Arena

What are you trying to do with threading? Load stuff in real-time or do some sort of loading screen while the map loads?

load stuff with a loading screen. but just using std::thread::joint() was causing errors

So there should be a callback function to the map load function. I believe this will be called as entities are being loaded. If you put your drawing updating inside this where you draw to the screen (the stuff that's inside App::Loop()) then you should be able to have a loading screen that updates as your map is loading. It might not be the smoothest but it could be something.

 

I believe anything you do with LE entities needs to be on the same thread that LE was initialized on.

I never had succes with multithreaded loading screens. You can show a screen like Rick says, but a dynamic progress bar (or anything moving for that matter) is out of the question.

Aggror, if you can show a screen couldn't you show some sort of moving progress bar? I mean it would probably not be fluid but you should be able to get something moving on screen right?

Nah it is a simple but 'hackisch' way. You display an image as loading screen, then the next frame you load the map, before the screen is updated. After the map loading, you remove the image being drawn. So a moving or rotaing image is not possible.

Can't you just call the map.load hook every entity to update an animated icon? It would be like this script http://leadwerks.wikidot.com/wiki:entityindexer but instead of indexing them you are manually drawing to the screen and syncing it. It would look jerky but you know its loading. Also if you know how many entities there are in the level ahead of time (say you wrote a loading script to count it for you and stored the info in a file) you can do a proper progress bar.

Yeah, I think if you take the 2D drawing logic that's in App:Loop() and place it in the map loading hook you could get a moving image.

Can't hurt to try it. Perhaps you can find the entity count in the map format metadata.

Would be nice if josh made a function to get entity count for a map.

there is as map has a top level entity. you then get the number of children from of that entity. Cant quite remember the commands but i remember something along those lines.

Wouldn't that be after the map is already loaded though? You'd need this count before you load the map to make an effective progress bar.

for what i was doing by populating the map with pivots wouldn't take long to load the map then as each entity is loaded update the loading screen.

Maps in Leadwerks 3 do not have a top-level entity.

 

Trying to thread things that were not meant to be threaded will be a guaranteed disaster, really. These commands are not meant to be called from different threads, unless you want to do all your own thread locking, which is insanely complex. And probably impossible without the engine source code.

Any chance on getting a function call that returns how many entities are in the map without actually loading them? Just the number? This would allow people to make an accurate progress bar while loading if they put draw and update/flip code inside the map callback.

It is possible. I don't think it's a priority right now though.