What's more performance friendly? Sprites or constrains?

cesar_m_romero

I want to start a new game with several characters. Now, what would be better performance wise:

1) Full sprites for every movement (walking, running, jumping, etc)
or
2) Constrains. For example creating and animating the arms, legs and feet separately from the body and constraining them to the torso.

We are talking about a dozen actors, perhaps a little more, at the same time on screen.

Thoughts?

FloridaGames

I would assume its easier for the game to move an image than it would to change an image, but the difference isn't a lot, probably not even noticeable. I would do which ever is easier to create.

StusApps

sprites!!

constrains kill performance. save your sprites as 8bit png files with a limited palette and you can have hundreds of them in your game without a problem.

my latest game has over 200 images used in one scene (all 2kb 8bit png files now). Loads quick and no slow down at all.

FloridaGames

I was just guessing. Go with what stusapps said.

cesar_m_romero

Well, that settles it. Thanks a lot!

Sandbird

I have made an animation with 163 frames...Gamesalad almost popped up a message saying "Is that the best you can do ?" :P

StusApps

Sandbird said:
I have made an animation with 163 frames...Gamesalad almost popped up a message saying "Is that the best you can do ?" :P

Did it play ok on the device? I had a 60 frame animation of 8bit pngs that crashed when run on a 3gs or below.

cesar_m_romero

Sandbird said:
I have made an animation with 163 frames...Gamesalad almost popped up a message saying "Is that the best you can do ?" :P

LOL! I would also like to know what the performance of that played on the device. I've had good results so far with sprites but I fear that too many might be a bit too much, specially with older devices (I would love just to develop for the iPad 2 but we have to have good frame rates with iPod touch 1st gen ).

I'll be doing some tests after I prototype the game and will post the results.