I look for an explanation of libgdx's asset manager

Question

I would like to create an asset-manager. I know the asset-manager from "libgdx" but I don't wanna use libgdx because I am just programming for studying purposes. So I wanna understand my entire program and write everything from scratch.

Now I need an asset-manager because I ran out of memory. I took a look at the asset-manager of libgdx but it is pretty much code and I don't understood it completly.

I would like to know what is the basic principle/idea of libgdx's asset-manager. I know that it works with hashmaps and in its own thread to be asyncron. But that is pretty much all I know.

Could you help me?

Answer 1

There isn't much more to know, other than that it's using Maps to store and retrieve all assets.

Basically you have something like this:

class AssetManager {

    private Map<String, Object> assets = new HashMap<String, Object>();

    public void storeAsset(String key, Object asset) {
        assets.put(key, asset);
    }

    public <T> T getAsset(String key, Class<T> clazz) {
        return (T) assets.get(key);
    }

    public void freeAsset(String key) {
        assets.remove(key);
    }
}

That generic getter is optional, you could also do the casts yourself, but like this it's more convenient. Of course there is error handling and everything missing, but that's how a very very basic AssetManager might work.