yimx said:
Hello, I'm developing a game engine and I'm currently importing all the textures in the Asset folder when the project is opened.

Do you mean doing this in some kind of editor or in a runtime (which will run the actual project on engine)?

Dynamic asset loading in runtime obviously makes sense - for 2 reasons - first one is, that you don't need to load ALL assets for given game into memory, as they may not fit into memory, and second one is loading times. When loading zillion assets it's also going to take a long time to load anything.

Editor is another thing, and often more problematic decision. First of all - how big are your projects? If they are small enough to easily fit RAM and VRAM, and more importantly you have well defined data formats that are very fast to load, loading ALL files may make sense. The problem is what to do when projects become too big.

• You may need preview on images/meshes/… - dynamic loading when looking through assets will be necessary
• You will need to track what is in scene and hold it in RAM and VRAM for use

I can shortly describe mine:

Currently the engine's editor loads all the resources in project directory (although it can do so on demand). Basically all resources that are in project directory are referenced (and also watched for changes for hot-loads). They can either be loaded right away (which is what I currently do in editor now), or loaded whenever and object referencing the resource is processed (which is what I do for some assets in runtime).

In the above screenshot you can notice that I'm looking for some texture - opening a texture manager where you can filter through textures by name, and most importantly - you do see how texture looks like. Because the last thing you want to do, is selecting only by name.

I don't use meta files (the necessary data is stored in memory and possibly serialized/deserialized from (non-compiled) scene file). Asset diffs are handled either by directory watcher directly (while running editor) or by scene loading (when opening scene from editor).

In runtime no, in editor yes. Well… yes for standard textures (virtual textures no - you wouldn't be able to fit them in memory).

This could run into problems when assets are too big - my point is, that it is managed and dynamic (which I guess is what you want). Easy to switch between those 2 approaches technically on asset type level. Also, it's not just textures that are in assets - for some it makes a lot more sense to load them all (shaders, custom components (basically cpp files runtime compiled to dlls), etc.).