Question

I’m making a loading screen for a game in c#. Do I need to create a thread for drawing the spinning animation as well as a thread for loading the level?

I’m a bit confused as to how it works. I’ve spent quite a few hours messing with it to no avail. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Short of anything that XNA may provide for you, anytime you require doing multiple units of work at once, multiple threads are usually required – and almost certainly if you want to benefit from multiple CPUs. Depending upon exactly what you’re looking to do, you’re already in one thread (for your main method / program execution) – so you don’t likely need to create 2 additional threads – but just one additional for either the loading of your level, or for the animation.

Alternatively, as was probably more common-place in older development when developers weren’t concerned with multi-core CPUs, etc., you could use tricks such as doing both the level loading and the animation in the same thread – but at the expense of additional complexity for combining both concerns into the same unit of processing. (In every x # of lines of processing for loading the level, add code to update the loading animation.) However, given today’s technology, you are almost certainly better off using multiple threads for this.