Loading asset thumbnails, will they ever fail?

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#1

My question is: will loading thumbnails for assets at runtime as needed ever fail or take a long time.

MORE DETAILS:
We make our pet icons/thumbnails using viewport frames, we upload those as models then use the web API to get the image. We plan to have dozens of pets in the end and each pet has 3 icons for each rarity version. So 100 pets would mean 300 icons. The icons are 150 x 150

I can get these thumbnails into game in 2 ways. First I can simply upload them into Studio and they will load for the player when they join.

OR i can “lazy load” load the for the player as needed using the API at runtime. The first time they are loaded I would cache them in replicated for the rest of the players session. Now instead of a player having all the icons, they will have just what they use during their sessions.

My thoughts on why to do this would be for saving memory on the client. Should I worry that hundreds of icons at 150 x 150 would tax the memory on some devices?

My only reason not to do this is that I worry that the icon might not be there fast enough when the player needs to see it in their GUI.

I don’t fully understand how guaranteed the retrieval of thumbnails is, and/or how t handle when it dooesn’t return the image expected.

#2

Remember One thing, the client is requesting assets from Roblox via internet, there are always chances that it can fail through multiple factors, one being the bandwidth of the client.

Since, you mentioned pets, I assume there also is an inventory system. What I would suggest would be, to preload the images using Roblox’s Content Provider Service that the player owns.

Now coming to handling the retrieval of images / failed images. Content Provider Service has functions that allow you to handle it

For example:
PreloadAsync takes in two parameters.

  1. The asset Id’s
  2. The callback function to handle failed assets.
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#3

Thanks, but question: Why would you choose to prelaod the assets with Content Provider Service vs just loading the images into Studio in ReplicatedStorage or similar?

#4

Preloading assets via Content Provider Service will load them before everything else less important needs to be loaded. In other words, PreloadAsync will load contents before Replicated Storage will do. (Basically, the assets of preload async are loaded first).

Another reason why you might choose Content Provider Service would be because you can handle assets that failed to load, there is no other way as far as I know to handle them.

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