Preloading?

somewhere in the forum i read that the preloading-system is not working anymore since 4.x. is this correct? 

The preloading system is fully operational since V5. But I really recommend to not manually preload. The system is really intelligent and works really well. You also need to unload everything you preloaded again, can often happen that you miss something.

thank you. can you also tell me: is the "loading screen" only shown at the start of the game? or can i also use it between scene-changes?

the loading screen cannot be used between scenes.

Instead of preloading, try to optimize your images & animations as best as you can. Use XnConvert to batch convert your images & animations to webp. Lossy webp has the largest compression, but sometimes the images have artifacts on them in VS, so I recommend using Lossless webp instead as those are always displayed correctly & still have about 1/3 to just under 1/2 file size difference of the png file(s). Smaller file sizes for the images/animations means the images will load in faster which is great for people running potato rigs & laptops.

Try to crop your animations & images too. Images with transparent backgrounds the size of the scene/game default resolution might not be much larger in file size than a cropped version, but they will load in slower. Also never use duplicated image frames for animations to display the same frame for x time, instead use the built in system for manually adding a custom pause/delay value for specific frames.

For animations that should play forwards & then backwards, you could either use Lua script to do that or alternatively just manually insert the forward playing frames one at a time or play the animation forward, then use the play animation action part to play it in reverse immediately afterwards.

There's no need for preloading if you optimize efficiently.

"The preloading system is fully operational since V5. But I really recommend to not manually preload. The system is really intelligent and works really well. You also need to unload everything you preloaded again, can often happen that you miss something."

Can anybody explain this a little bit further ?
How this works in V5 ? Screen by screen, or will be preload all
animations before a screen starts ? 

etcetc. I really wonder how this works.

Once an animation is played all of its sprites are put in the preload queue and the next image is prioritized, that's basicly it. It was optimized for Pillars of the Earth, because the PS4 has really slow cpu cores but therefore many of them. The engine can't predict which animations you're gonna play, so this is the best system.