Non-blocking loading and copying of large Texture2D's in C# for Unity

Question

I\'m building a Unity app for Android which deals with loading a lot of large textures dynamically (all images are over 6MB in size as png\'s). These textures can either com

Answer 1

Eventually this problem was solved by creating a C++ Plugin (built through Android Studio 2.2) that makes use of "stb_image.h" for loading the image, and OpenGL to generate textures and map a set of scanlines onto the texture over multiple frames. The texture is then handed over to Unity through Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture().

This method does not make the work asynchronous but spreads the loading cost over multiple frames removing the synchronous block and subsequent frame out.

I wasn't able to make the texture creation asynchronous because in order for the OpenGL functions to work you are required to be running the code from Unity's main Render Thread, so functions must be called through GL.IssuePluginEvent() - Unity's docs use the following project to explain how to make use of this functionality: https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/graphicsdemos/

I've cleaned up the test repo I was working on and written instructions in the README to make it as easy as possible to understand the final solution I came to. I hope that it will be of use to someone at some point and that they won't have to spend as long as I've done to solve this problem! https://github.com/NeoSouldier/Texture2DTest/