FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hi! Are there any tricks to reduce the loading times for subgames/mods?

I have a jukebox mod with a lot of Ogg Vorbis files inside which apparently are loaded everytime the subgame is started (seems Minetest does not know what “cache” is …). I also noticed that removing the jukebox mod significantly cuts down the loading time. However, removing jukeboxes is not an option to me.

Anyway, loading of thse music files takes long, so do you know any tricks to cut down the time?

It would be nice feature to be able define that particular sound would be loaded on demand. There is no issue to wait few sec before music starts (wait before loaded) at moment when you asked. Would be super feature if it could stream bit by bit (short wait time until music starts playing). I think its worth to create ticket on MT engine github and see what dev would comment about it.

Yeah, I think you're right. But streaming is probably going to be hard.
Maybe some sort of “smart loading” could be implemented, only loading the most important files first and the less important files could be loaded when you're in the game.

But I have hoped there is maybe a simple trick which I could use right now.

Jukebox..... I was wondering if I should get rid of jukebox on my Noob Academy server, but it's just too cool :P

Wuzzy wrote:loading times .. Jukebox files .. are loaded everytime (seems Minetest does not cache)

It's not just musicfiles - same goes for repeated download of files from other mods
(especially big mods, like Homedecor).

So, a cache-mechanism / local directory, to download/check/update files
only when needed would be useful for minetest in general.

This would also save datatransfer-volume - some people use mobile devices,
and probably only have a limited datavolume each month.

A newbie question/idea at this point: Are texture-packs client site or server site? If client site: will the client download textures even the pack contains them? Maybe that is a way to reduce the downloads. Could ogg-files be included to texture pack for delay reductions?

they can be either server or client sided.

I have heard that using the separate HTML asset server feature thing can reduce download times.

Byakuren wrote:I have heard that using the separate HTML asset server feature thing can reduce download times.

remote media server. It means that the Minetest instance doesn't need to worry about serving media, instead a separate web server does that.