Asynchronous loading is finally working…
After about a month, I’ve finally got the loading of 3D content into the data cache working asynchronously. It’s taken me a lot of work to get this right as it had to be implemented using double message queues to offload background workers to another thread while the main thread continues with the rendering. Once the 3D content is loaded into the main cache, a message gets pushed back to the rendering thread, signalling that the new block of buildings is ready for display.
It’s a pity that the YouTube clip ends up so blurred, but it might be that it doesn’t like my 21:9 aspect ratio monitor. The original clip is 2560×1080 pixels, so it started out OK.
Now that I’ve got the message queues sorted out I’m going to go back and revisit some of the rendering. The Earth textures also need to load on demand as you can see how I’ve compromised the level of detail above. Also, the buildings don’t load into buffers on the background thread yet. The SSD disk on my machine is so fast that it looks like they’re loading from RAM when actually they’re coming from the disk. Running on my iMac at work shows what a big difference it makes.