How to preload textures ("warm up")?

Development Rendering
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Hi,

I’m working on a mobile game and while performance is good on low end devices like the iPad Mini, we have a short hiccup whenever a texture needs to be displayed for the first time. This is most annoying with particle effects: whenever an emitter class that hasn’t been spawned before shows up, the game hiccups and this often happen in situations that can cause the player to miss whatever they are trying to do.

I tried to place those emitters in the level itself, off-screen, but that doesn’t work as it seems the textures are only truly loaded when they are visible. I’m thinking of using a SceneCapture to force them to load, but I would like to know if there is a way to load them ahead of time so the game goes smoothly after the level is loaded.

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Hi , did you find a solution for this as I olso have the same problem in all my mobile projects?

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I ran out of time and went with a SceneCapture that captures to a very small render target. I positioned it so it can view my entire level, disabled “capture every frame” and after my loading is done I nudge the SceneCapture a very small amount, which forces it to update. This eliminated the hitches when the camera first looks at something for the first time.

I also placed an actor with billboards for all the textures used in my particle effects within the scene capture view. That eliminated the hitches when they show up during gameplay.

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