I am using FMOD studio on Nintendo Switch.
Some of the bank files have a lot of events.
One of them over 16000 events.
And I notice a very slow load of those.
I found out that using streaming, the non ‘L’ versions of the lib, and non-blocking loading mitigate it.
But it is still too slow.
Are there any recommendations on how to speed it up further?
Lastly, is loading bank events O(N) meaning that double the nr of events, double the loading time for them? Or are they somehow worse, so that splitting up into many banks could help?
Loading a bank loads the metadata for all the events in that bank. A bank that contains more events contains more metadata, and so takes longer to load. We therefore reccomend splitting your events up into multiple banks, and only loading the banks your game needs when it needs them. There is no limit to the number of banks you can have loaded at the same time, other than the memory required to load them.
For example, if your game has a number of different locations, but the player can only be in one of those locations at any given time, you could create one bank for each location, and load each location only when the player enters that location or an adjacent location. Similarly, if your game contains a large number of creatures, each with their own collection of events, but only a subset of those creatures are in play at any given time, you could create one bank for each species of creature, and only load a creature’s bank when it appears in the game.