Hello,
Our load times on older mobile devices (e.g. iPad2) are dismal. We load quite a bit of 2D art, all of which is stored in PNG Atlas style sprite collections.
Anyway, after doing some research on the interwebs, I discovered that the standard 2DToolkit method for loading PNGs (calling LoadImage on a TextAsset's bytes followed by Apply) is quite a bit slower than loading the asset using Resources.Load.
I hacked together a test -- put one of my 1024x2048 .png assets into Resources and loaded it both ways on an iPad 2 -- and lo and behold, the LoadImage / Apply method timed at about ~0.75 seconds vs ~0.13 seconds for using Resources.Load.
I'm curious if there's some reason I shouldn't just be spitting built sprite collection .PNGs into /Resources with unique names, saving those names in the tk2dSpriteCollectionData, and then loading them via Resources.Load instead.
Additionally, this isn't accounting for the benefit of not having to load those PNG TextAssets just to create the actual Texture2Ds, which Unity automagically does if the Sprite Collection is referenced in a level anywhere. It certainly seems like it warrants a further experiment on my end, unless there is some clear reason this won't work that I am missing.
So is there some clear reason this won't work that I'm missing?
Thanks in advance!
David