I'm having weird problems with this plugin. I had tested a previous version several months ago to see if preloading resources would reduce the obvious frame rate drop when certain Yanfly plugins used an animation or sound effect that hadn't been cached before, but even with this plugin that never seemed to be resolved.
EG: Battle Engine Core allows for you to specify the attack animation of a monster through note tags on that monster. For bats, for example, I was using a bite animation. In my test troop, when the slime in the group attacks, it has the normal animation that all monsters use by default, and there is no issue, but in the same troop, when the bat attacks there is a brief frame drop as the animation is loaded in the first time.
When I tried to fix this by telling this plugin to preload ALL animation files, it seems to lose certain animations entirely and just ignores the fact that they're missing, even for skills that usually worked without frame drops. The allied weapon animations worked, but everything the enemies did had no animations.
Additionally, despite having /img/system/ in the preload, the system images are not being hit in the cache, and this somehow results in the MadeWithMV plugin splash screen showing a black screen instead of the image.
On the YEP_SaveCore loading screen, the facesets of none of the actors in the active party are loaded when the load screen comes up, until you exit the screen and open it back up again. This also happens when the faces folder is in the preload group as well.
The default battlers of all of the active party are successfully preloaded, but if the actor has a note tag on him that changes his battler to something that isn't his default, the new sv_actor sprite is not cached, and fails to load in a test battle, unless you escape or finish the battle and then go a second time. This was also tested with the sv_actor folder preloaded, with no change.
The only noticeable positive change this plugin provides to me is a brief loading screen between loading a savegame and the map loading, which given the other problems with it, isn't super useful.
I've had my eye on this plugin for a while, as it's a very useful idea, but it still doesn't quite seem to be working for me.
Edit:
Alright, I jumped the gun on this somehow and assumed the plugin was working when I had configured it incorrectly.
Now if I tell it to precache "img/system" The game shows me a load screen before the MadeWithMV screen comes up, which never goes away. The console log says it's stuck at 22%, never telling me what file is giving it trouble, but never loading.
If I only tell it to preload the MadeWithMV.png file instead, it works, and the splash screen actually loads.
Edit2: turns out it was trying to precache thumbs.db, a file that is hidden in windows by default, so I wasn't aware it was there. Modified the plugin to ignore .db files, seems load now. Will get back to you once I've plugged in the folders and stuff again.
Edit3:
Even with the image files from img/animations cached, there is still noticeable slowdown on the first attack of a bat who's using the bite animation, as if the animation isn't actually being cached at all, until it's shown once. I'm not sure why it's doing this. The faces, and battlers issues I had earlier all cleared up when I actually used the plugin correctly, but the whole plugin seems to have no actual effect on the slowdown I was experiencing in the first place, and only provides a really long load screen prior to game loading, with no positive effect as a trade off.
Please let me know if you need further assistance.
