Asynchronous resource loading

[LowFire]

Are there any plans to implement asynchronous resource loading as a feature? I was looking through the code of the plugin and noticed that it uses Godot's simplified load() function to load resources from disk. This is fine if you're loading only small amounts of assets, but this will be a huge issue if you have to load a ton of assets, as load() is synchronous and will cause the game to become unresponsive if you have to load a ton of stuff. (https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/io/background_loading.html#background-loading)

I think it would be nice to have the option to asynchronously load assets from your resource groups, and maybe allow the ability to register a Callable that can listen for when loading completes or fails for each loaded asset. It would definitely greatly improve the performance of games that have to load a ton on assets. Godot has the ResourceLoader static class that can aid in achieving this. (https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_resourceloader.html#class-resourceloader-method-load). The two methods this class has that can do asynchronous loading is ResourceLoader.load_threaded_request() and ResourceLoader.load_threaded_get()

So yeah, just a suggestion. This feature would really help my game because my game will have a ton of items that need to be loaded. This plugin is really nice because it allows me to group together all my item into groups and makes loading them super easy. The only issue so far is the lack of support for loading assets asynchronously.

[derkork]

Sounds like a good idea. Gotta conjure up a nice API for this but indeed. Thanks for suggesting this!

[derkork]

Okay, finally found some time to implement this:

@export var one_thousand_images:ResourceGroup
var _background_loader:ResourceGroupBackgroundLoader

func _on_load_button_pressed():
        # will start the background loading process
	_background_loader = one_thousand_images.load_all_in_background(_on_resource_loaded)


func _on_resource_loaded(info:ResourceGroupBackgroundLoader.ResourceLoadingInfo):
        # the callback gives you an info object which has the overall progress (0 - 1)
	_progress_bar.value = info.progress * 100.0
        # the path of the resource and a success flag
	_info_label.text = info.path + " : " + ("OK" if info.success else "NOT OK")
	# a flag if this is the last resource
         _done_label.visible = info.last
         if info.success:
              # and the resource itself (if successful)  
              var resource = info.resource
              # do something with the resource here.


func _on_cancel_button_pressed():
        # cancels the background loading. it is guaranteed that your callback will no longer 
        # be called once this returns
	_background_loader.cancel()

2024-01-31_08-30-14.mp4

Would this API work for you?

[LowFire]

Would this API work for you?

Yes, this looks fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to implement this! :)