koobas.hobune.stream
Instantiate many Prefabs / Async Loading
Hi,
I am aware that there are already many questions and answers related to async level loading, but none of these really satisfy me. So here we go:
I am working on an MMO-style game. The world is pretty dynamic, so instead of using unity scenes we create game areas at run-time. This means that a) dozens of prefab resources get loaded b) thousands of prefabs get instantiated
For large areas this takes some time. Now I would like to have an animated loading screen and I don't want to lock up the main thread for several seconds anyway.
Surprisingly, instantiating the objects takes A LOT longer than the actual resource loading. It is much faster in a real build than in the editor, though.
Question 1: Are there tricks to speed up the instantiation process? Batch-Instantiate or something like that? It seems strange that it should take so long.
Question 2: Is there a way to put the loading/instantiating in a background thread? Basically I want my own version of LoadLevelAsync(). I already considered using the Fiber-like logic of CoRoutines, has anyone already tried something like that?
Thanks!
Since this question still receives views but no answers I'll quickly describe how we solved it. May not be the best solution but works for us so far:
We put all objects to be instantiated in a list. A CoRoutine works its way through that list and yields after a fixed time limit, continuing in the next frame. This allows us to draw a progress bar and do network updates during level loading.
Thanks for the update to your own question. I too am looking for Async Instantiate. I need not so many items to load in very fast but also not lag the current game at all. I might make a list similar to yours and have the LoadNextItem be based on deltaTime.
I wonder if I could load in parts of an Object over time, such as; if (deltaTime < 0.02) load 1% of Item X per frame.
Thanks for your reply anyhow, it helped.
@MadDave I think you can use Scene.AsyncLoad (Additional Load) method to reach your target. I guess it is possible to combine scenes with prefabs linked, so they represent pool of instanced reusable objects. But I am not sure about shaders prewarm and initialization phase that can increase your frame time. It usually happens because some Unity default components do a big work on Awake, which process in main thread context.
