Many animated bitmaps on screen

Comments

• antix Member

  February 2016

  Have a wee read of this.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_pool_pattern
  
  Then look at this thread.. http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/4769/simple-item-pool-class/p1
  
  I'm using something similar in my programs and it seems to work.
  
  Does anybody have a better way?

  Likes: rolfpancake

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• totebo Member

  February 2016 edited February 2016

  Pooling, nice! I suppose it would remove/reduce the overhead of creating and removing objects at the expense of memory, but not affect CPU use of objects actually "doing something"?
  
  @sinistersoft, you had a clever way of reducing CPU in your Dungeons game I seem to remember?

  Likes: SinisterSoft

  My Gideros games: www.totebo.com

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• antix Member

  February 2016 edited February 2016

  @totebo, yep but in the init you should create a bunch of bitmaps first. I use 256 because that seems to be a pretty good number for my programs. I hardly ever see the pool creating new bitmaps because it ran out.
  
  @SinisterSoft, I'm keen to know your secrets too if you're keen to share :>

  Likes: SinisterSoft, totebo

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• SinisterSoft Maintainer

  February 2016

  Nothing that tricky...
  
  I animate split the sprites up into groups of 4 - so that each group gets it's own frame. So anything to do with animation or 'intelligence' only happens once every 4 frames.
  
  I do movement and collision checking every frame however, if need be then I can change the animation to an explosion or whatever if there is a collision.
  
  If there are a lot of sprites that only move every so often then I just use a tilemap. The objects stay on the tilemap and I process it in quarters for animation. This way it looks like there is a lot of movement on the screen when in reality only 80 or so sprites need to move at once. Sprites just move in/out of the tilemap system when they stop on a specific pixel boundary.
  
  The main thing is not to allocate and deallocate things - I just hide sprites that are not in use and then if something needs to appear I set the graphic and unhide the sprite.

  Likes: totebo, antix, rolfpancake

  Coder, video game industry veteran (since the '80s, ❤'s assembler), arrested - never convicted hacker (in the '90s), dad of five, he/him (if that even matters!).
  https://deluxepixel.com

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• totebo Member

  February 2016

  Thanks @sinistersoft, some great tips there.

  Likes: SinisterSoft

  My Gideros games: www.totebo.com

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• antix Member

  February 2016

  Yeah, thanks @SinisterSoft. I really like the objects moving between being moving objects and static tiles

  Likes: SinisterSoft

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• totebo Member

  March 2016

  Guys, this Pooling business is genius. My poor iPod is swimming with its head above water, for a change.

  Likes: antix, SinisterSoft

  My Gideros games: www.totebo.com

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