Any interest for a fast threaded compressed texture loading plugin on pc/mac/ios ?

Hi all,

For one of our projects, we have developed a native plug in that enables us to load images read from disk or web as compressed textures in a unity game without any hickups. And I mean LOTS of textures. Think large city flythrough with progressive texture refinements, or google-earth-style landscape navigation.

Basically, if you use Texture2d.load and then texture2d.compress, you will get a severe performance hit for each texture you load.
On my core i7, that's about 30ms per 512x512 texture. If your application requires lots of texture loading, then you can't expect to maintain a smooth framerate while loading. On IOS, of course it gets even worse --> your first person view simply halts for a short while every time a texture is loaded in RAM. Not compressing the textures reduces the problem, but results in using up to 8 times more memory, which is also a big problem on IOS, and to a lesser degree on PC.

Anyway, we've developed a solution to address this problem, and we're considering making it available through the asset store. Before we go through the process of making samples and tutorials, though, we'd like to hear if anyone of you are interested in such a plug in, and if it s worth the packaging effort on our end.

Any feedback on this is appreciated.

 

That seems really interesting. I would buy it.

 

Very interested, especially with mobile support!

 

interested but why no android?

 

Right now we only have unity pro ios licence, but if there is enough interest we might consider android too.

 

Do you have any more info about how it works ? With your plugin what would be the performance for loading a 512x512 texture ?

 

I will post an EXE demo that compares Unity's standard loading and our plug-in. Looking at the profiler on PC, the loading with our plug-in can hardly be noticed, I think it's less than a milliseconds while Unity's loading is over 30ms on my test machine.

This is because of the way we handle it:
- the Texture2D object is created upfront (in your c# code, so if you have a lot of them, you may recycle them), with the proper size and image format.
- the load request is passed to our code
- our code retrieves the texture pointer, loads the image data and converts it to the target format in a temporary image buffer
- once the converted data is ready, it is copied to the Texture2D object and an event is raised to let you know that the texture is ready.

I will try to capture profiler screenshots too to illustrate that

 

I might be wrong, but it sounds like this is pro-only, if you're editing textures at runtime? Or am I misunderstanding something?

 

You are correct. The plug-in would be using native code, so it's Unity Pro only.

 

Sounds very interesting.

What the conversion exactly means?

Does that mean that the image data which will be loaded by your code is not PVRTC compressed one but your plug-in do convert it when any request is arrived?

Hope to see it soon.


-Kim

 

very useful tool

 

@kimsama : on IOS, the fastest is to have the files in PVRTC format, download them, and the plug-in would load them directly in the texture, no conversion. Live compression can be really slow on IOS. On PC, remote image could be png or jpg, and it could be compressed live to say DXT1 and loaded into a DXT1 Texture2D object

 

Agree.

I read over again what you've mentioned to figure out why your plug-in is fast.

So is the key point that Texture2D.Load is slow?

Actually I have an experience with writing similar code at last year which is retrieves twitpic with native objective-c (or java code on Droid device) plug-in via network then renders it on Unity's view when it is needed.

Well, those twitpic images are usually .png or .jpg as you said, but overall size of that are much small so I even couldn't imagine there can be huge performance boost.


So, even is it possible to speed up loading a scene by letting your plug-in load textures not by Texture2D on iOS?


Cheers,


-Kim

 

interested, Android iOS

 

+1 for Android iOS support

 

! GREAT PLUGIN !

+1000000 Android iOS support

 

[SUB][/SUB]Just a note that you can use native plugins on the FREE mobile licences.

http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses

View attachment 60850

(I've screenshotted iOS here but Android is the same)

 

I'd like to buy it only if it's easy to use, simply to get integrated into our current workflow...
so how the workflow of this plugin will be? Does it support 2d games? Can it be integrated with 2d toolkit?
We are building a 2d game where a lot of texture is loaded at each level, we did suffer from a great hiccup when loading a level...
If you could make it work with 2d, defintely will buy it!
Cheers!

 

Definitely interested in buying this.

 

See here, I've made something similar and we're using it in our product:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/184840/download-and-use-pvrtc-texture-ios.html

Basically, what you do is just have a "pre-compressed" texture placeholder which you duplicate. Then get the native texture ID (which is like a pointer to the texture) and then use OpenGL code in the native plugin to upload the compressed bytes using the texture ID.