Automatic Data Initialization

As anyone who’s used the library knows, data initialization had to be done manually before loading/screenshotting/fetching data, until now. Dragonite recently reminded me that this could probably be handled automatically, and I agree.

Manual initialization was originally meant to encourage best performance practices. But over time I realized two things:

1. It doesn’t really matter for small-ish rooms in many use cases.
2. People wanted the library to just do both initialization and loading in one go, often not caring about the performance penalty since it wasn’t bad enough to be concerning.

Starting with v2.3.0, data initialization now happens automatically on the first load/screenshot/data fetch call. That first call will be slower since initialization is included, but all future calls will be just as fast as before, since the data is already initialized and is retrieved from the internal cache.

Important!

Manual initialization methods are still available and recommended at game start or during loading screens, especially when working with large or multiple rooms, when going for best possible performance during gameplay.

Effects Support

I’ve been under the wrong impression (never bothered to check again since Effects didn’t seem that important) that Effects data was missing from room_get_info(). Turns out it’s been included all this time, but the relevant variable name mentioned in the docs comes under a different name at runtime… So we now have Effects support.

• Added support for both Effect layers and on-layer Effects.
• Added a new ROOMLOADER_FLAG.EFFECTS Asset Type Filfering flag.
• Added a new RoomLoader.Effects() State Builder method.

Instance Data Getters

• Added optional filtering by object for .DataGetInstances() to only get data for instances of a certain object.
• Added a new .DataGetInstance() method for getting data for specific instances, using their room IDs for lookup.