Annoyed with preload times in Bass Abyss, it hit me this idea. It would be cool to code a system that caches all the game assets while the connection is idle. So, while I’m playing, jumping and blowing up stuff, the game is silently downloading the tiles, enemies and music of the next level. Once the current level is finished, the assets of the new level are already in my local disk, or at least some of them. Bam, the new level starts immediately. I’m ready to rock!

I tested it with my dial-up and some slow cable connections. It works like a charm.

But then, the last week, they upgraded the broadband connection at my office. I tested my game, the previous version online without caching system. To say least, the game loaded ridiculously fast. Even the level transition didn’t feel that annoying, actually it was a joy to watch the load bars filling in seconds. So, is everybody in USA, Europe and Asia downloading my game this fast? Jeez, then why the heck did I waste my time coding that class. Oh yeah, for the users with slow connections.

Ah well. So, in the pause menu, you’ll see a tab that says advanced options. If you’re lucky you’ll see some download progress. If not, just close that screen and forget it exists, everything has been downloaded already, no fireworks to see.