Performance question loading 1000's of sprites

Hi,

I need to load 1000's of sprites for my item, entity, mapitem etc. databases when the app launches. Currently, I do this by putting them all in a spriteAtlas (for faster rendering), then calling SpriteAtlas.GetSprite("spriteName"); 1000's of times during the initialisation of the databases.

This works, and seems very fast on a high end PC, but obviously a lot slower for mobile devices.

I assume "GetSprite" is a bit of an exhaustive search, taking a lot time to find each one.

I had an idea to populate a GameObject with an array of the sprites (in the correct order), and then just retrieve the sprite from the gameobject by index, which should be a lot faster, right?

My quesiton is that although the retrieval may be faster, would the very initial boot time of the app be longer, as that big gameobject needs to load? Are sprites stored in a game object stored by a reference, or when the gameobject instantiates does it have to search for those sprites anyway?

Thank you, sorry I'm really bad at explaining things

 

My understanding is when a scene loads, anything any scene object references, anything those references reference, etc, etc, are all loaded into memory up front. Whether this would be unacceptably slow in your case would require actually testing it.

 

I needed to load the big spriteatlasses anyway (which I think loads the sprites?), so I'm not too conerned about the gameobject loading all the sprites~ I suppose I just need to do some testing.

Does anyone know if there's any benefit between using a ScriptableObject vs normal GameObject stored as a prefab to just store a bunch of sprites in?

Thank you

 

If you don't need the GO and transform component, then SO is the way its meant to be. It's cleaner and lighter.

 

Thanks a lot, I'll check it out!

I've just made a script to place all my item sprites into a gameobject with a sprite array, in the picture. There's 1400+ unique items in my game. Does anyone see this being problematic before I get too far into it?

 

Just incase anyone's wondering, using a ScriptableObject to store my sprites instead of using SpriteAtlas.GetSprite("name") saved a huge amount of time~

My database loading ona super high end PC went from 2.6 seconds down to 0.4seconds when applying this to ~3500 sprites, I still have maybe a couple more 1000 to more to do. So obviously this will save a lot more time on mobile too!