Loading Textures in two separate threads at the same time doesn't work sometimes

[DanDixon]

Perhaps I'm doing something I'm not supposed to...

But I've found that trying to load textures in two separate streams will often cause one of the texture loads to fail.

Here's the error that I get:

Code:

05-27-2008 11:03:20 | TEXTURE MANAGER : Couldn't find the texture file ##MEMORY:22633444|59015.

The work around is pretty easy...

1 - Don't load textures in two separate threads at the same time.

Or

2 - Given this situation, where bmpPage is a System.Drawing.Bitmap (.net):

Code:

        Dim stream As New System.IO.MemoryStream
        Dim buffer() As Byte

        bmpPage.Save(stream, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png)

        buffer = stream.ToArray()

        Dim pointer As IntPtr = System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.UnsafeAddrOfPinnedArrayElement(buffer, 0)
        Dim datasource As String = Globals.GetDataSourceFromMemory(pointer.ToInt32, buffer.Length)

Just keep retrying this line in a loop until the _TexID doesn't equal zero.

Code:

_TexID = TextureFactory.LoadTexture(datasource, "webpage", Engine.WebSizeX, Engine.WebSizeY, MTV3D65.CONST_TV_COLORKEY.TV_COLORKEY_NO, True) ' MTV3D65.CONST_TV_COLORKEY.TV_COLORKEY_BLACK)

[SylvainTV]

Interesting, do the streams come from TVPackages or ?
TV is supposed to be able to handle several opened Streams at same time.
I will take a look but i guess it will be very hard to reproduce and debug.

[Raine]

I'll be working with streams too at some point, I'll be sure to let you know what I'll find, might help with the testing

[DanDixon]

The stream comes from a System.Drawing.Bitmap(.net) which is created from a hidden internet explorer browser window. I'm positive that this Bitmap is good. Again... I just have to keep retrying TextureFactory.LoadTexture until it returns a texture ID that's greater than zero.

The other textures that are loaded in the other thread are all dds files and I've never had any issues loading them. I do load a single texture from a package, but it's loaded first before I create the 2nd thread that causes the problem.

[petroz]

why not use make it a critical section?

[DanDixon]

why not use make it a critical section?

petroz... I don't understand your question.

[Raine]

I think he meant using thread lock primitives