Caching to speed up frame-switches?

[Xeeko]

Is there a simple way to cache all the graphics and sound in order to speed up the loading and handling of a frame?

I have a game that plays over an area of 15000x15000 pixels, divided into 36 frames of 2500x2500 pixels each. It is very important that the switch between these frames are as seamless as possible, and there's loads of huge graphics, and multiple channels of sound playing at the same time.

Can I create a loading screen to preload all the media content, and if so, which objects do I use? I have looked around, and searched the forums and it seems one can use the Animated Picture object to cache graphics, but does it work globally? Can I create a loading screen, cache all the graphics, and have them load in different frames later on?

How would you accomplish this with sound? I've seen that Looki has created a soun player that caches sound, but I'm not exactly sure how it worked. And again, does it work globally?

This is a project aimed at commercial release, if possible, in the future so it's important all the details are worked out.

Thanks for any assistance!

[JimJam]

I'm pretty sure MMF automatically caches its sound on the first time its played. If you notice in the Data tab... button.. thing. It has a list of all the sounds you use in your application.

I haven't had the problem in MMF2, but in MMF1.5 the program would pause momentarily to cache sounds. What I did to solve that is have a blank frame in the beginning of the game (before or after splash screen) that had a solid black background.

Then, in the events, create a "start of frame" or "run once" event that plays every sound in the game. after they are played, in the same event do "stop all samples".

What this will do is load in all the sounds, but since you call a stop right after, it won't audibly play them. This would cache the sound.

Then the last event would be "Always: Next Frame". This will make the blank screen only appear of a second or so.

But again, I've never had this issue in MMF2, and don't know if the solution above would work.

[Xeeko]

Well, that does sounds like it would work, I'll try it out.

Is possible to do something similar with graphics?

[Xeeko]

It didn't work, unfortunately