text: is there any technique for efficiently prefetching lots and big images in java?? i'm making this game. it's a fighting game. the background image is 1000 x 600 and   i have 2 fighters, each with about 372 images of 400 x 300 size. each move is created by using an array of images. and each animation/move  ( punch, jump, etc ) has from 1 to 30 images. ( 1 for duck,  30 for walk, 21 for jump etc. ). i thought that my game was finally going to work when i had one player in the screen only . it was working actually, with almost no flaws, but as soon as i a dded the second player to the screen, you can see the updating gets slow...it kind of looks like slow motion sometimes, andthen, images start disappearing as i execute different moves.   what can be done? i would recommend breaking down your images into tiles. large images don't run well because graphics hardware is optimised to take smaller chunks of data at a time.  the other thing you can do is not write it in java lol. because of java's virtual machine nature, it doesn't perform well on real-time tasks like games. if you translated your code line-for-line into c, i bet it'd run almost twice as fast, even before optimising it with tiles. i'm guessing a complete re-write isn't an option, but at least you for next time :)  rawlyn.