Basically, i have a global script in which i preload() every room the player can enter. So if the player enters a door, i just call the autoload to instantiate the scene the player's supposed to end up in. It works pretty well, but i'm not sure if this is a good practice?
As i understand it, preloading something keeps the scene loaded even when it's not being used, so would having a lot of rooms preloaded eventually lead to performance issues?
Certainly increases the memory used, but unless you hit virtual memory where it starts swapping to disk cache I don't think it should affect performance all that much as such... though if you are constantly loading and unloading data to/from the GPU that can indeed affect performance as well. To really know you need to profile it.
Squiddy i am doing a project with an architecture similar to yours. I have seen no issue. If it is doing what you need it to do, I wouldn't overthink it.
For larger scenes, you may want to load upon reaching them, but I hardly have to do this.
Worry about the problems when they show up and actually affect the game.
