Is Irrlicht thread-safe?

[Andi.Dascalu]

More precisely, can I make a loading screen with the actual loading happening in another thread(loading textures and meshes), while the main thread is responsible with the drawing?

[ACE247]

Yes you can hack something like that. However unfortunately though, Irrlicht is NOT thread safe.

[aanderse]

More precisely, can I make a loading screen with the actual loading happening in another thread(loading textures and meshes), while the main thread is responsible with the drawing?

Only loading 1 texture or mesh per application loop has always left all my applications responsive.

Something along this idea will work for you:

Code: Select all

 
list<string> texturesToLoad;
texturesToLoad.push_back ("texture1.png");
 
...
 
list<string>::Iterator iter = texturesToLoad.begin ();
 
while (device->run ()) {
 
    driver->beginScene (true, true, SColor (255, 100, 101, 140));
    smgr->drawAll ();
    driver->endScene ();
 
    if (iter != texturesToLoad.end ()) {
 
        ITexture *texture = driver->getTexture (*iter);
 
        iter++;
 
    }
 
}
 

[Andi.Dascalu]

Thanks for the answers. I implemented something like that aanderse but even by loading one texture at a time there was some lag, but it looks like I will have to cope with it.

[aanderse]

Thanks for the answers. I implemented something like that aanderse but even by loading one texture at a time there was some lag, but it looks like I will have to cope with it.

i'm somewhat shocked to hear that because i've loaded many different meshes and textures and never had any problem with it

texture or mesh?
what format and size?

[Andi.Dascalu]

I am programming for mobile devices, Android specifically; the textures are in .png format and the largest is 1024*1024. To load 10 of these it takes about 2 sec in which time I would have liked to have sharp response to input.

An idea springed to my mind though, to use another instance of the VideoDriver to do the loading in another thread. Will try to implement it today.

[Radikalizm]

I am programming for mobile devices, Android specifically; the textures are in .png format and the largest is 1024*1024. To load 10 of these it takes about 2 sec in which time I would have liked to have sharp response to input.

An idea springed to my mind though, to use another instance of the VideoDriver to do the loading in another thread. Will try to implement it today.

Why use such a texture size for a device which probably is never going to be able to display it in that resolution? That's just throwing away memory and performance

[Andi.Dascalu]

One of them is a texture atlas, it keeps all of my buttons in one place, that is why it is so big, and the others have their purpose, but this is not the point of the discussion.

[mongoose7]

So the answer was in your hands all the time. Split your texture into smaller sub-atlases.