Performance issue loading resource

Questions & Answers
1

Greetings,

I would like to hear some suggestion on how could I get over this situation:

I have a catalog that is presented in a scroll view. It´s components are stored in a text asset with over 9,000 lines (each line represents an indivudual entry with it´s features) and parsed into a list.

The problem is that the app takes too long to load and build the list. Usually it takes over 20 seconds to load (considering iPad… make it ~10 seconds on the macbook using unity editor). The main interface and user interaction will only take place when the loading process is complete. Our project would only be fine with 5 seconds to load.

Basically the text asset has it´s lines splitted into a string array and then each of the ± 9,000 lines get parsed again with Split(…) to extract the data for each component.

I tried to load 500 entries, start the app and later load bit by bit while still running the app, but it get´s the FPS to the ground (~3 to 8 FPS as opposed to 200+ FPS using the regular way).

I also tried to load 500 entries and then given specific triggers load a bit more, like when you scroll the scrollview too much it would load 40 more entries, but it´s lags too much (~1 second) and it doesn´t look good at all.

I did a method that checks if the touch device isn´t getting any touches for some time and then load all the entries it can while it´s idle touch-wise. But this does not solve the problem.

I thought on threads but I am not sure how C# threads would work on iPad.

Well, I hope someone could give me a suggestion on this situation!

Thanks!

2

Have you tried to split the reading function over several frames using yield? You could read the 400 first lines, then enter a loop where up to 40 lines were read and the yield instruction executed until the whole file were read - something like this pseudo code:

function Start(){
    ... // read the first 400 lines
    while (not eof){ // pseudo code, obviously
        ... // read up to 40 (for instance) lines
        yield; // suspend routine and return to this loop next frame
    }
}

Yield places the function on hold and lets Unity to do other jobs until the next frame, when it returns to the instruction right after yield and resumes the execution.