A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine
What is the best practice for preloading effects?
In my app I use over 200 different sound files (.mp3). Should I preload each and everyone of these? It is likely that less than half of these will be used in one use of the app.
Also, what about preloading things such as tilemaps or spritesheets?
[edit] I found many answers for sprites/spritesheets in the Texture2D demo provided.
Is there a "Best Practices for PreLoading" document somewhere?
Thanks All!
Harv
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
What you do with preloading depends on the requirements of the game. The most important thing is to initialise the sound engine before you play the first sound, this can be done by simply accessing the shared instance of SimpleAudioEngine. Other than that it really depends on how you use the sounds and what sort of latency is acceptable.
The TomTheTurret example that comes with CocosDenshion illustrates recommended practices but again these will vary depending upon the game. For example, it is recommended to use wave files for effects but you have chosen to use mp3 - maybe that was because you have a lot of sounds and you want to keep your app under 20Mb.
Also, you may be better off using CDAudioManager. This allows you to load sounds into "slots". If for example you had a bonus sound that changed every level then each level you could just load the new sound into the bonus sound slot, this would take care of releasing the data for the prior level whereas with SimpleAudioEngine you have to explicitly unload the old sound and then load the new sound.
I ended up having such a headache with preload effects crashing my game that I just straight cut it out, and that's from a guy who gladly spends 3-4 days hunting down the smallest of bugs. Until it's fixed, I'd just avoid it.
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
@christophersisk - that is not a very helpful attitude. How is it going to get fixed if you aren't willing to provide any information about the problem? The back trace from the console (type 'bt') and the console output from CocosDenshion are appreciated.
I also just fixed a bug that occurred when you preloaded more than 64 sounds is that your situation?
@Steve Oldmeadow - Thanks much for the info. I am actually using a mixture of CDAM and SAE, I believe it may be your method I use to play sequential audio also (with CDAM). I was experiencing some issues when using a single Audio Manager/Engine where as in some instances a previously played audio bit would play when the new one should. Regardless (got off topic),
I did choose .mp3 specifically for size restraints. Although some of the audio is .wav.
I am experiencing some (very minimal, but noticeable to me) lag with some sound files, so I thought I should preload them.
Also, which version of CocosDension has the fix, I believe I am experiencing the issue you spoke of.
Again, Thank You!
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
@Steve Oldmeadow - In my app simply not preloading the effects was a good enough solution for me, while I would love to help out debugging, audio code is not my forte, and I have plenty of other areas I need to be working on if I want to put food on my table. As much as it would be interesting to learn about audio code and help squash those bugs, there are people who are far more talented than me in that area, and who will find and fix those bugs much faster than I would ever be able to. I would assume that you are one of them.
You must log in to post.
