PreloadLib: Simple Preloading Library

[royal sparrow]

Developer Forum post

I am unsure how useful this will be to anyone. Maybe people do this for their games and I just don't know. But, it has been fun to make.

I know for myself, atleast, I'll be using this in my game

[vagrant horizon]

hmm whats this

[old scaffold]

Library

[royal sparrow]

With one book in it, probably

[royal sparrow]

Essentially the idea is to wrap PreloadAsync in a way that allows people to easily add behaviour like on progress on batch on asset and to safely capture and store errors in those functions as well as actua asset fetch failures

[solar summit]

could you add support for preloading tagged instances?

like i give a meshpart a "PRELOAD" tag

[old scaffold]

Table of instances

[vagrant horizon]

hmmm

Im gonna check it out rn

[solar summit]

i'm not going to write paths to each instance i want to preload each time

also what if the path changes

[old scaffold]

That's not I meant lol 😭

I meant it should just have support for tables which have instances in it

So then you could preload tagged instances

[royal sparrow]

CollectionService:GetTagged() should return a table, so you can actually just pass that directly in as the first argument to the function

Let me know if that's not working!

[solar summit]

let's take an eyes 👀

a look even 👀

[royal sparrow]

A peak, perhap?!

[solar summit]

⛰️

peak

peek 👀

is this module peak ⛰️ or not even worth taking a peek 👀

[vagrant horizon]

bro I keep forgetting

2 times today

I tried to open the link

and it failed

I got lazy and close the tab off

this will be my 3rd time

yep

its not loading

@royal sparrow can you drop the file

I fucking hate roblox

I can help you setup github

if you want

[royal sparrow]

Yes. Should I save it as .luau or .lua?

[vagrant horizon]

doesn't matter to send me

but for github

use luau

oh wait

the code in the post

is that the entire thing?

[royal sparrow]

Yes

[vagrant horizon]

ohh

let me check it out then

[royal sparrow]

Okay thank you

[vagrant horizon]

looks good at a first glance

I just don't like camelCase for table entries

to keep it consistent with roblox

but that's stylistic preference

I like the callback style signaling

seems pretty easy to use

the asset type can be made a lot more specific instead of any

but that's fine considering there are many types of assets

returns a result

even tho some stuff here I don't understand

like total

guessing its total assets

would be better to name it TotalAssets

or simply AssetCount

overall looks solid and intuitive

@royal sparrow good job

[royal sparrow]

Ah, should it BeLikeThis?

[vagrant horizon]

yeah PascalCase

is what roblox uses

[royal sparrow]

Yes! That's what makes it easy to hook up to a loading screen or something

[vagrant horizon]

they deprecated camelCase for table entries and class fields

[royal sparrow]

Thank you, I had fun making this. It's a nice, simple start to open source stuff

[royal sparrow]

Like a union of types? I figured there would be too many applicable types that at some point it'd be more convenient to just do any. Did you have something else in mind?

[vagrant horizon]

yeah there definietly can be

but even as simple as Instance | string

would at least give users a starting point

without reading anything about it

orlike Instance | string | {any}

[royal sparrow]

Ahh, that makes sense

Thank you for the guidance, I'll probably make a small 1.1 update just to correct these sorts of things

[vagrant horizon]

np just let me know if you need help

like I can help you setup github

if you ever want

[royal sparrow]

Okay, when/if I decide to do so, I'll let you know

[vagrant horizon]

or if you just want to keep it as source code

that's also fine

[royal sparrow]

I think it's small enough for now to be src

[vagrant horizon]

ye ye

fairs

[royal sparrow]

But it might grow. I'm waiting for feedback as to what else can be done to make this even more applicable

[vagrant horizon]

I think this covers a lot of the cases with asset preloading

although for animations it may be weak a bit but that's what #1490093613747798098 is for

[royal sparrow]

It's definitely a lot cleaner than the janky stuff I do in my games because I hate working with content provider. Probably the biggest thing for this is batches, since I think if the batch is too large, it'll just not work

[vagrant horizon]

I kinda stopped worrying about trying to preload apart from animation lol

Imma be fr

it's too hard to manage

I just let roblox do its thing

and accept a little delay for the first time

but for a loading screen

[royal sparrow]

Yeah, like I havent tested this on my actually finished game to see if this even works

[vagrant horizon]

this would be incredible

[royal sparrow]

For sure, the clamped percentage just makes that whole loading bar jazz that much easier

I just wonder if silly people will pass 10000 item table for "preloading" 💀

[old scaffold]

Hmmm

For Roblox I get, but if it's you scripting? Use what you want

[vagrant horizon]

api start being inconsistent

Im forced to use roblox

so I see pascal and camel at the same time

in same code base

just creates inconsistency overall

[old scaffold]

All I got from my coding style is

use camelCase for mostly everything, use PascalCase for classes and types

[cunning gate]

cvan u add utility to keep shit loaded

like how if u have an imagelabel in trhe corner of the screen with size 0,1,0,1 it keeps that image loaded even if it isnt visible and stops roblox from unloading
or how roblox keeps all decals in workspace loaded at all times

preloadasync is nice but there r still cases where roblox will unload ur assets, would be nioce to have a module that makes preloading and unloading stuff easioer without having to worry about roblox Snatching the asset right outta ur hands mid-session

like :ForceLoad(): id and :Unload(id) or something would ve nice, beats having to do instance.new() and gui[id]:destroy() when i wanna force load and unload somthing

if u dont wanna cus its not necessarily part of preloadasync thats fine, jsut a suggestion based on what i think has no utility rn

this is mostly for vfx and ui since those r the two asset types roblox will try unloading if its not in use (even if u preload it)

[cunning gate]

deadass i wish i could have this mindset

you have not lived rthrough the horrors of image loading that i have,,, you do not know how evil roblxo can be...

"oh you wanna change somethings texture in runtime? 🥺

nice thatll be 15 seconds of delay and im gonna IMMEDIATELY forget the assetid it used to be lol hope u dont mind"

[old scaffold]

schrodinger's texture

[vagrant horizon]

[royal sparrow]

I think that might be a great idea. I tried doing that before to trick the engine but it just saw right through it and refused. I'll probably have to read into the caching system in more depth.

[cunning gate]

you can keep an imagelabel(s) with the image(s) 1x1 pixel and roblox will keep it cached so long as its Visible property is true, then delete the imagelabel to unload it (or turn off visible if u wanna do like an object cache too or wtv)

[vagrant horizon]

this keeps me up at night

[cunning gate]

its a bit tedious to do normally across scripts so i look forward to whatever simplification u end up w

[vagrant horizon]

knowing this exists

😭

[cunning gate]

😭