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[cmspice]

So here is the situation, lets say I have either a game with some fairly large assets or a fairly large gameworld. To reduce loading times I want to preload assets for unvisited areas. Of course I could do this all at once on initializing the game but it's much smarter to do this during the idle times of my main loop.

Being not the greatest expert on threads, I'm really not too sure how they prioritize threads. But is there any way to properly activate a thread for a given amount of time? E.G. at end of main loop I know I have 10 ms to spare so I want to run the asset loading thread for 10 ms before switching back. Is this there some way to do this or am I approaching this problem in totally the wrong way??

[mcc]

Normally if you're using threads it's to avoid situations like having to partition out timeslices in an "okay, I have 10 ms, go" sense...

The normal thing to do in this case would be to say usleep(n*1000) (or Sleep(n) on Windows) where n is the number of milliseconds you know you'll be idle for. What this does is that your thread surrenders for the specified number of milliseconds, and requests to be woken back up after that. During this time your background thread will be free to work. Of course, if you do it this way your background thread will just run all the time and thus will also be running while you're not idling. But this is okay. It's probably best to just trust the OS to hand out timeslices, especially if you're new at threading, unless you have specific reason to believe doing otherwise is causing performance issues.

[kometbomb]

Yeah, threading essentially is automated slicing. How about simply setting the thread priority with SetThreadPriority() (Windows)? I don't know how to prioritize gfx stuff since a lot of the time spent in a loader thread will be waiting for textures etc. being sent to the GPU.

On an image viewer I'm developing I notice no slowdown when uploading textures in the background and drawing the loaded textures in the main thread. So, I wouldn't worry about thread priorities. Premature optimization etc. Just make sure the thread idles properly when not doing anything, e.g. with a Sleep(1) or so.

[cmspice]

Okay, cool thanks.  I guess that makes my life a lot easier.  I'm such a control freak in my code sometimes .