Is MediaTracker reliable?

Game Play & Game Design
#1

I wonder if there are any limits to the mediatracker. I am loading hundreds of images for my game, some of them very small. There are some arts that did not get loaded since I see in game first time they are used there is a small flicker.

I tried checkAll and waitForAll and even did System.out.println on the path to see if it matched and it seems it matched exactly the path where i have the images.

I have also inced Xms and Xmx in case it was a memory shortage problem. Is there any kind of limits I do not know of such as the game deallocating that memory that was suppoed to contain all images in game or something else?

#2

I use ImageIcon to load my images. The call is blocked until the image is loaded and then you can getImage();

#3

Thanks!
That worked. Maybe because java.awt.Image is AWT while I use SWING components (Swing JPanel as painting area)?

Do I need to use ImageIcon then for every frame, or is there a point in me recognisising if a image is “firstdraw==true” and use ImageIcon only then? Does the ImageIcon usage change performance or memory usage to any extent otherwise I just use this call for each frame

ImageIcon icon=new ImageIcon(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(s));
Image ret=icon.getImage();

the old code is here below ->

//Image ret=Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(s);

which causde flicker first time an image was drawn.

#4 
Does the ImageIcon usage change performance or memory usage to any extent otherwise I just use this call for each frame

Of course, creating an extra object and then throwing it away cause some extra gc. But I don’t think it is noticeable. I always load all my images this way.