hiccupping for new objects/textures

[Keith W. <kw...@cs...>]

I may have asked something similar to this, I'm not sure.  I am using a
1.6Ghz single proc G5 with 64M VRAM, and 768M RAM.  My environment
presently consists of terrain tiles and nothing else.  I only submit tiles
that are within a particular radius of the user.  Likewise, I switch
textures in for each tile at varying resolutions depending on the tile's
distance from the user (I do a similar trick submitting various trimeshes
of varying detail).

As I move around my environment, the program hiccups noticably (1/10th to
1/5th of a second, give or take) just as the boundries of tiles cross the
various distance thresholds.

I have determined that loading the higher res textures causes worse
(longer duration) hiccups.  I figured this out by simply eliminating the
highest res textures from the list of possibilities.  Of course, this
behavior makes perfect sense since these textures would take the longest
to load.

Two questions:

My highest res textures, which of course cover the entire area of a
terrain tile, are 1024 pixels across, or just over 1 mil pixels square (2
mil bytes of course).  Granted, that's a pretty big freaking texture, but
I do have a very modern computer.  Should I be getting a hiccup for this
kind of texture-loading?

Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this problem?  Can I
slowly load a texture in pieces in advance of needing it, by anticipating
its need in the future, so that it is mostly loaded by the time it is
needed?

Clearly, two other solutions are to settle for lower res textures and to
use smaller tiles.  Smaller tiles means many more objects in the world
which slows the program down.  Lower res is simply undesirable.  At the
highest res I have 32 pixels per "meter" on the terrain under the user's
feet.  That's about 1 pixel per 3 centimeters, which will offer pretty
slick, beautiful textures, but maybe I just can't offer that much beauty
in my program.  What do you think?

Thanks.

________________________________________________________________________
Keith Wiley                                kw...@cs...
http://www.unm.edu/~keithw                 http://www.mp3.com/KeithWiley

"Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson,
that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to
aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy."
                                           --  Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland
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