Libgdx - Using TextureAtlas with Skin. Memory Consideration?

Question

I am using TextureAtlas to load my assets for a game in Libgdx. I know that TextureAtlas's method findRegion is expensive, memory wise, so it should be loaded once and stored.

I was just going through the Skin class where I encountered this example:

TextureAtlas atlas = ...
Skin skin = new Skin();
skin.addRegions(atlas);
...
TextureRegion hero = skin.get("hero", TextureRegion.class);

This means that I can get my textures using Skin as well. My question is, how does the Skin class loads these assets. Does it loads everything upon skin.addRegions(atlas);? Or does the skin.get("hero", TextureRegion.class);loads it from the TextureAtlas on every call, making it as expensive as the atlas.findRegion("hero") call?

I am looking to load all my assets from TextureAtlas at the start of game. So I was thinking that I could do a simple load in skin and then use my assets from there?

Answer 1

It appears from the source that the regions added to the Skin are stored in an Array and found via string comparison in 0.9.8 just as they are in the TextureAtlas. The lookup times will be similar.