Fast loading files in applet

Performance Tuning
#1

Hi,
My game is going to be able to be played as an applet, but since there will likely be lots of levels, etc, I don’t want to store all the resources inside the jar file. It will just be too big. Instead, I will only load the files that I actually need for the current map/level. But I don’t know a fast way of doing this. Can someone tell me a good way? Mostly it will be images and text files that need to be loaded. Possibly sound but then again I might keep the music (atleast a minimal amount) stored in the jar.
I’m using LWJGL if that makes any difference

Thanks

#2

here some random link how to load an asset from the server the applet comes from.
http://www.realapplets.com/tutorial/ImageExample.html
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/jndi/tutorial/beyond/misc/classloader.html

But I never really loaded anything outside the jar yet. But there are many examples on the web.

#3

Thanks for the reply, Damocles

I couldn’t use the first link because it is just for AWT images, not LWJGL or anything. And I’m not sure about the second one, lookup returns an Object but I need a stream.

I have found this:

URL url = new URL("http://example.com/test.png")
InputStream is = url.openStream();

Is this a good way, or is there a better one? I’m really trying to make loading times as fast as possible.

#4

There is no other way :wink:

#5

Make your applet able to be hosted on any site using getCodeBase():


URL url = new URL(getCodeBase(), resource);

Also, if stuff is big, you can always store them zip/gzip’d server side, and uncompress them in the applet. Of course, applets don’t lend themselves too well to big data due to memory constraints. But still, it may help with performance on slower connections since the cost of the download will certainly be greater than the cost of the decompression.

#6

Ok, Thanks :slight_smile: