Runtime asset loading - best practice

If your object pooling (creating assets up from before game play), I don't think there is any performance gain from embedding or loading a bitmap from an external source, with the exception of file size if your loading tons of bitmaps and dont want to package them with the application. I could be wrong though!!!

In my opinion, once you create a new bitmap instance, and its on the display list or ready to be used, it shouldn't matter how you had retrieved it..( i think)

Depending on what your doing, you may want to load your bitmaps first to store in memory (create a pool)...  if they are going to be used soon enough that is.

for example if you have a mario brothers type game with character and recyclable enemy's,coins,terrain pieces... I would recommend to create them all at the start of the level. You don't want to be creating new...() instances during game play, but do you want EVERYTHING in the app created up front? most likely not.

My personal "technique" is to pool all my game objects up front. If the user goes into the game menu, i am often creating new instances/bitmaps at that time, then calling dispose() and setting things to null when the leave the menu to attempt to save memory.

Message was edited by: boat5 // spelling

Having done some more research into this over the weekend I'm now wondering whether I should be loading the bitmap assets at all or embedding them at compile using the Meta Embed tag?

Can anyone offer some advice on the best way to manage bitmap assets on mobile devices, should I load them in and if so when or should I load them or should I embed and if I embed how do you manage different screen resolutions etc

Any advice much appreciated!