Lazy loading assets

Help & Support
1

Have you guys looked into allowing developers to configure some sort of system for lazy loading assets?

This is really useful for someone making a large game like the legend of zelda ocarina of time.

Rather than downloading all the assets of the game (~500MB ), you only pull in the assets that are required for the player’s given surrounding (e.g. the first floor of the Deku Tree).

When developing games for the web, this is hugely important. No one will wait 5+ minutes for a 500MB game to stream in. As soon as they exit the tab, the next time they come back will be another 5+ minutes…

2

I recommend starting out by reading the section ‘Preloading and Streaming’ in the PlayCanvas User Manual.

3

Awesome article. Thanks Will.

I’ll experiment with this feature and update this thread.

As a curiosity, what do you think about the state of the web in supporting full game experiences like the Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask). Is the web mature enough?

Certainly Playcanvas seems to be at the leading edge of web game tech. So I guess a more fitting question would be: is Playcanvas mature enough?

4

There’s no technical reason why you couldn’t make Ocarina of Time in PlayCanvas. The issue there is production costs - not issues around technology. Ocarina of Time was shipped on a cartridge with 32MB capacity. That’s for the entire game - you can stream the whole thing in maybe a minute on an average internet connection. But to produce a game of that complexity costs a great deal of money.

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