Irrlicht Engine

i have a menu system that i set up and i was going to start loading the game while in the menu (textures, objects, etc) but when something loads the menu freezes. is there any way to do this without the freeze or is there a way to stream textures in game?

Thanks,
Catron

PS: if this should be in the advanced section please move it

You can display a loading image over the screen while the textures are loading, or you can preload them at program start (But it will freeze at program start offcourse)

or

you can use threading, but it will get complicated with Irrlicht because its not properly set up for threads.

And heres a good threading library to get you started: http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/