Speed with textures

moopf

OK, I'm doing some optimisation work on an app I'm developing so I can get the core down as much as possible to give me head room for more bells and whistles. This got me thinking about some of the internals of Gideros and before I start doing some of my own benchmarks I thought I'd see if either @atilim or others in the community have some input on the following:

1. What is the rough overhead of Bitmap.new and TextureRegion.new?
2. Is it better to pre-define bitmaps (possibly as globals but I'm not sure I entirely like polluting that) and re-use them as needed, as everything will actually reference the single bitmap due to the way Lua works, presumably.
3. I'm really thinking about making some changes to BMFont which I've been pulling to pieces. The way the standard class (as downloaded from Github) works is that it grabs TextureRegions and creates bitmaps out of each character in your string every time you update the text. My thought here is to pre-grab the regions and create the bitmaps in advance on init as presumably this will provide a performance gain when updating text, but is there a large memory overhead to doing this I wonder (probably not, due to point 2)

So any thoughts? I'm already quite taken with point 2 for re-used components as this must provide a speed benefit so I'm going to run some tests now on that.

If none of this makes sense, or if I'm missing the obvious, do forgive me - been staring at the screen developing for the last 12 hours.

Cheers,

Gareth

moopf

And straight away, as soon as I've posted, I've realised a problem with pre-defining bitmaps - surely, because Lua works by reference, changing attributes on a bitmap object, e.g. alpha etc. will affect everything that uses that bitmap.

So, is there any gain to pre-grabbing the TextureRegions?

moopf

And plus, idiot that I am, a bitmap object can only be a child of one parent. Told you it had been a long day

moopf

Pre-caching the texture regions definitely has a performance benefit so if you're re-using a lot of the same images over and over, just keep one of it in a variable and reference that.

OZApps

a bitmap object can only be a child of one parent

With Single Parents being common, how do you think Bitmaps could stay behind?