Lazy-loading assets

[VinnyVicious]

I'm using (https://icculus.org/physfs/)[PhysicsFS] in a project that i'm compiling with Emscripten and i'm curious about lazy-loading assets. Has anyone worked with this kind of asset loading? I mean, maybe i can write some JS code that will load the files into the virtual filesystem of the project, allowing the user to cache the project code, but not the assets. Right now, if i change an asset, i have to recompile everything and then clear the cache.

[cwoffenden]

I did lazy-loading for a previous project. From a high-level it went something like:

• implement the notion of a virtual file system, mapping an MEMFS mount point to base URL
• for each file request, check whether it already exits in the MEMFS, if it does return it
• if it doesn't exist create a emscripten_async_wget request, storing the result in the MEMFS, with a completion callback

That's simplifying it, since behind the scenes the preloader would wait until all associated assets were loaded (and was able to load, say, *.txt from a given root by having serialised directory listings). In use it works quite well, with assets being cached by the browser for the next load.

[stale]

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