I’ve been playing around with a transition screen for one of the mini-games in my app. The player can select a few settings and then start the game. For the “loading screen” I just move the settings interface to the left and show the “Get Ready!” texture that was off to the right of the screen. When I do this, there is a noticeable hiccup in the performance as the second texture comes on screen (even if I reduce it down to a tiny size).
Does Unity prevent loading assets that are off camera? Is there any way to cache it when the scene loads up?
So I played around, reduced the texture sizes to minimal (to the point where it looks terrible). Even if I get it down to completely unacceptable levels (each texture < 128k in total size), it still has noticeable hitching when the second texture scrolls onto the screen. So as an experiment, I scaled the second texture up really huge so that it exists on screen at all times, and set it it color(0,0,0,0) in the background via script. Now it plays smoothly every time.
This feels really hacky and for any decent size scene this feels like it could be a huge problem… is there a way to force the engine to load and cache the texture from the start? Is this behavior improved in any upcoming android builds?