(09-29-2015, 03:06 PM)Shonumi Wrote: I'm going to take a guess on this and say that it might be really hard to pinpoint where exactly a game says "load navi.gcimg".
Exactly. It's easy to detect when the game is trying to read certain data from the disc, but we have no idea about which data on the disc corresponds to which file in the texture pack. If Dolphin is going to support anything like that, the texture pack would need to provide mappings for it, and that would involve quite a bit of work from the texture pack makers.
(09-29-2015, 03:06 PM)Shonumi Wrote: Something more straightforward would be to load a texture from your HDD/SDD or whatever as soon as texture data hits Dolphin's emulated VRAM and is properly hashed. But you'd still come across (or at least run the risk of) stuttering due to an I/O bottleneck. That would only potentially solve the issue of consuming massive amounts of RAM during gameplay.
That's pretty much what currently happens when prefetching is disabled.
(09-29-2015, 03:06 PM)Shonumi Wrote: Here's a crazy idea that would be an absolute pain to implement, but I think it has some merit. If Dolphin could somehow assign certain textures a priority level, certain textures could be loaded on startup, while others are loaded dynamically as they are encountered in the game. It would probably be something best left to the people making texture packs (they can pick and choose common ones, or do a 50/50 type deal). They could chose smaller textures or lesser used textures to be loaded dynamically.
Maybe? I'll keep this in mind in the future.