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Preference asset creation, which while consistently created in early assets, can be requested at any time before then and often is, currently takes about 15 to 25 seconds to produce. Because of extremely hard to reproduce BYOND icon bugs, most of this is done on the same tick. Lowering the cost of initialization itself is very tricky. Some of it we can theoretically optimize, such as creating humans for antagonists, others we can't, such as the raw cost of icon blending. Furthermore, adding new icons later down the line would just increase this initialization time even more. Instead of optimizing the asset creation, which is an uphill battle, this instead chooses to amortize the cost by caching preference assets created per git revision. This means that preference assets will be created, with their long delay, only once whenever the code changes. This is done on a config, defaulting to on so that production needs no changes, as the whole point of these being made at runtime at all is that it keeps assets/art styles consistent, and PRs making subtle bugs that break preference generation in some way is not uncommon. On development, your git revision will stay the same until you commit, no matter what code changes you make.
Asset cache system
Framework for managing browser assets (javascript,css,images,etc)
This manages getting the asset to the client without doing unneeded re-sends, as well as utilizing any configured cdns.
There are two frameworks for using this system:
Asset datum:
Make a datum in asset_list_items.dm with your browser assets for your thing.
Checkout asset_list.dm for the helper subclasses
The simple subclass will most likely be of use for most cases.
Call get_asset_datum() with the type of the datum you created to get your asset cache datum
Call .send(client|usr) on that datum to send the asset to the client. Depending on the asset transport this may or may not block.
Call .get_url_mappings() to get an associated list with the urls your assets can be found at.
Manual backend:
See the documentation for /datum/asset_transport for the backend api the asset datums utilize.
The global variable SSassets.transport contains the currently configured transport.
Notes:
Because byond browse() calls use non-blocking queues, if your code uses output() (which bypasses all of these queues) to invoke javascript functions you will need to first have the javascript announce to the server it has loaded before trying to invoke js functions.
To make your code work with any CDNs configured by the server, you must make sure assets are referenced from the url returned by get_url_mappings() or by asset_transport's get_asset_url(). (TGUI also has helpers for this.) If this can not be easily done, you can bypass the cdn using legacy assets, see the simple asset datum for details.
CSS files that use url() can be made to use the CDN without needing to rewrite all url() calls in code by using the namespaced helper datum. See the documentation for /datum/asset/simple/namespaced for details.