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The ResourceManager class is actually just a base class for a number of other classes which are used to manage resources. In this context, resources are sets of data which must be loaded from somewhere to provide OGRE with the data it needs. Examples are textures, meshes and maps. There is a subclass of ResourceManager to manage each of the types of resources, e.g. TextureManager for loading textures, MeshManager for loading mesh objects.
ResourceManager's ensure that resources are only loaded once and shared throughout the OGRE engine. They also manage the memory requirements of the resources they look after. They can also search in a number of locations for the resources they need, including multiple search paths and compressed archives (ZIP files).
Most of the time you won't interact with resource managers directly. Resource managers will be called by other parts of the OGRE system as required, for example when you request for a texture to be added to a Material, the TextureManager will be called for you. If you like, you can call the appropriate resource manager directly to preload resources (if for example you want to prevent disk access later on) but most of the time it's ok to let OGRE decide when to do it.
Probably the only time you will need to call a ResourceManager is when you want to tell it where to look for resources. You can do this by calling the addSearchPath and addArchive methods of the resource manager, which will cause it to also look in the folder/archive you specify next time it searches for files.
The above methods only affect the particular resource manager you call (e.g. it will only affect texture loading if you call it on TextureManager). Alternatively you can also call the static method ResourceManager::addCommonSearchPath or ResourceManager::addCommonArchive if you want ALL resource managers to look in the folder/archive you specify.
Because there is only ever 1 instance of each resource manager in the engine, if you do want to get a reference to a resource manager use the following syntax:
TextureManager::getSingleton().someMethod() MeshManager::getSingleton().someMethod() |
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