Multithreading in AssetManager

[ghost]

Multithreading is an important issue right now. Taking advantage of it in jME3 is critical. Some areas where multithreading can be used:

• Skeleton animation, mesh skinning
• Particle update
• Physics
• Networking
• Input polling
• OGG/Audio streaming
• Resource loading
• Terrain streaming

The details on how to implement these areas using multithreading will be specified later.

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Some parts of jME3 are already multi-threaded:

Physics runs in a parallel thread. Networking runs in a parallel thread. Audio and OGG streaming is done on a parallel thread. Terrain streaming/LOD is done in a parallel thread.

jME3 is still missing asset loading on a separate thread, which can be critical if the application loads assets dynamically.

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The AssetManager is the last part of jME3 that needs to take advantage of multithreading.

Reference on googlecode: https://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/issues/detail?id=94

[empirephoenix]

Actually, the assetmanager is quite capble of being used in a background thread, however the uploading to the gpu is not currently.

[shadowislord]

To upload to GPU you can use Application.enqueue() with a Callable that calls RenderManager.preloadScene().

Actually what I was thinking was something like

Future<T> loadAssetLater(AssetKey<T> assetKey)

which would let you load an asset on a separate thread. Perhaps you can set the executor via

void setExecutorService(ExecutorService executorService)

[pavly-gerges]

Long time, what's the status of this ? I will work on it, please provide adequate information on what's need to be done if possible, there a multiple approaches this can be done.

[stephengold]

I believe JME's asset manager is sufficiently multithreaded. In my opinion, what's missing is documentation---in other words, a tutorial explaining how to load assets in the background.

[pavly-gerges]

I believe JME's asset manager is sufficiently multithreaded. In my opinion, what's missing is documentation---in other words, a tutorial explaining how to load assets in the background.

Hmm, I guess this is not the case, jme lacks an async TaskManager in general, see #75, and by building a good async task manager we will be able to natively load our assets easily without the need of external means of java concurrency, I was willing to put some effort onto this and try implementing the feature if that is the case.