Question

I wonder if this piece of code will cause memory leakage? because I still don’t know when is a texture should be disposed. should the texture disposed in the end of method? or dispose it separately after unused?

private void loadAssets() {
    Texture texture = new Texture(Gdx.files.internal("data/controls.png"));
    TextureRegion[] buttons = TextureRegion.split(texture, 64, 64)[0];
    left = buttons[0];
    right = buttons[1];
    jump = buttons[2];
    cubeControl = buttons[3];
    cubeFollow =  TextureRegion.split(texture, 64, 64)[1][2];
    dpad = new TextureRegion(texture, 0, 64, 128, 128);     
    batch = new SpriteBatch();
    batch.getProjectionMatrix().setToOrtho2D(0, 0, 480, 320);
}

and I don’t really understand. why does there’s still memory leakage in Java?

Answer 1

Looking at the source of TextureRegion, it retains a reference to the Texture but doesn’t really take “ownership” of it – it’s never going to dispose it itself.

Going by that, you shouldn’t dispose of it at the end of the method, but you should dispose of it when cubeFollow, cubeControl and dpad are both finished with – which I suspect will be when the instance itself is finished with. (That may or may not mean you need a finalizer – it depends whether you have some control over the lifetime of this object.)

Note that you don’t need a separate field to store a reference to the Texture – you can get it from dpad using dpad.getTexture().