Loading the TexturesAtlas in a seperate Thread

Question

The tween animations is getting disturbed when I load the TextureAtlas. I wish to load my texture Atlas in a seperate thread.Could you please guide me to the safe usage of a thread in Libgdx. Any example / sample code is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

The easiest and best way to do this is to use the LibGdx AssetLoader class.

See https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Managing-your-assets

From the page...

Loading a specific asset is simple:

manager.load("data/mytexture.png", Texture.class);
manager.load("data/myfont.fnt", BitmapFont.class);
manager.load("data/mymusic.ogg", Music.class);

These calls will enqueue those assets for loading. The assets will be loaded in the order we called the AssetManager#load() method. Some loaders allow you to also pass parameters to them via AssetManager#load(). Say we want to specify a non-default filter and mipmapping setting for loading a texture:

TextureParameter param = new TextureParameter(); param.minFilter =
TextureFilter.Linear; param.genMipMaps = true;
manager.load("data/mytexture.png", Texture.class, param);

Look into the loaders mentioned above to find out about their parameters.

So far we only queued assets to be loaded. The AssetManager does not yet load anything. To kick this off we have to call AssetManager#update() continuously, say in our ApplicationListener#render() method:

public MyAppListener implements ApplicationListener {    

   public void render() {
      if(manager.update()) {
         // we are done loading, let's move to another screen!
      }

      // display loading information
      float progress = manager.getProgress()
      ... left to the reader ...
    } 
}

As long as AssetManager#update() returns false you know it's still loading assets. To poll the concrete state of loading you can use AssetManager#getProgress(), which returns a number between 0 and 1 indicating the percentage of assets loaded so far. There are other methods in AssetManager that give you similar information, like AssetManager#getLoadedAssets() or AssetManager#getQueuedAssets(). You have to call AssetManager#update() to keep loading!