Multiple Actors vs Animation

AfterBurnettAfterBurnett Member Posts: 3,474
edited November -1 in Working with GS (Mac)
Hi guys, I'm working on a game that requires several actors to move along next to each other at different speeds for a certain "effect". The thing is, it's looping so I could easily get away with doing it in animation.

My question is, which would be harder on the CPU? 3-4 large actors (all moveable), or one large actor with say 10-12 frames of animation?

Cheers in advance :)

EDIT: Actually... it might be more like the vicinity of 30 frames...

Comments

  • reddotincreddotinc Member Posts: 653
    What would the behaviours be on the 3-4 actors?

    // Red Dot Inc
  • AfterBurnettAfterBurnett Member Posts: 3,474
    Basically just moving from one side of the screen to the other, then looping back to start again. It's kind of like parallax scrolling but a bit different...

    There are no collisions or anything on them :)
  • StusAppsStusApps Member, PRO Posts: 1,352
    depends on the size of the graphics. When in use the images are uncompressed and an RGB image is 3 bytes per pixel. So might be able to work it out from there if the memory usage from using animation with large images would be too much. Animation will reduce cpu usage a little in theory. I would probably go with animating 3 or 4 actors as an image that fills the screen will take up 460kb per frame on the iphone. Where as a 100x100 actor is only gonna be 30k per frame, could stretch it out a little without losing too much quality.
  • StusAppsStusApps Member, PRO Posts: 1,352
    oh.. plus an additional byte for the alpha in pngs. So increase my numbers above by 25%
  • scorelessmusicscorelessmusic Member Posts: 565
    My latest check is that having a large actor is not a good thing for the framerate. Even with a large actor that tiles a 32x32 pixel graphic. The same overhead.

    In my iPad project, with nothing but a single actor of 768x768 with not rules and anything else, the framerate drops from 60 to 30.
  • chosenonestudioschosenonestudios Member Posts: 1,714
    What I've noticed is if you have a bunch of rules in one actor and then split them up into 2 actors you lose performance and you have longer loading times, I'd recommend to have as few actors as possible in your game. Kinda like having too many scenes.

    I think the problem is our GS games aren't actually compiled, their just interpreted. Meaning their has to be a program on top of it to interpret it into binary. (The only language computers actually understand) When you make an app in xcode, it COMPILES it, but I'm thinking in GS its just interpreted (explaining the long load times and a lack of decent performance) This would also explain why you have to have your .gameproj file inside your app.

    I think if they started actually compiling our games, we would see the performance and load times we desire.

    Also if this is totally off base, Gendai feel free to correct me, but I'm thinking this is exactly what the problem is.........

    -Will
  • VoidedSkyVoidedSky Member Posts: 1,095
    Wasn't that how it used to be? Didn't they give us our code in xcode format?
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  • chosenonestudioschosenonestudios Member Posts: 1,714
    I dont think they ever changed it.
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