Forums » Help » Optimize my game

Hi,

I have a big map where I place 430 entites in it. They are maybe 4 or 5 differents entities.

The problem is that the game is a bit slow on some devices...

Here's what my map looks like : http://i.imgur.com/7LOgYQ9.png

The red square is the user's screen.


How can I do to optimize the game ? I thought about a kind of blocking the init method until the entity is x pixel of the player... but it seems that it's not working.


Any help ?

Hi there,

it's difficult to give you an answer without knowing some basics about your game mechanics. Do you place all of your entities manually in Weltmeister? How do the 450+ entities behave? What do they do in the game? Can the player somehow interact with the entities that are off screen? Can the player move back and forth?

A wild guess: Instead off having hundreds of entities off screen, just spawn a couple of entities once you are near a certain area and remove those entities once they leave the screen. This way there would only be a couple of those entities at a time, instead of 450+.

Do you use Impact++ on this project?

http://collinhover.github.io/impactplusplus/

If yes, you could set the performance of those entities to static. Static entities skip a lot of checks and other method calls. Because of that the performance improves a notch. There is even a highPerformace property:

http://collinhover.github.io/impactplusplus/ig.EntityExtended.html#highPerformance

But you will lose some functionality and flexibility when your are using this.

Can I in some way make impactJS not handling the entity until it becames visible on the screen ?

You could skip the logic at the update/draw methods as long as the entity is not on the screen with the help of a flag:

// your entity class ..
isOnScreen: false,

update: function(){
    if( this.isOnScreen ){
        this.parent();     
    }
}

But you would still need to add a mechanic that sets the flag to true or false, depending on if it's on screen or not. However, i think it's a bad idea to have hundreds of entities in your game when you don't need them. You should spawn and remove them dynamically. That said, i can't give you any good advice as long as you don't share more informations on your game mechanics.

Quote from anasbud
Can I in some way make impactJS not handling the entity until it becames visible on the screen ?

In your entity update function, just return if the entity is off-screen. Effectively this means you'll have entities which are completely frozen until the player approaches them. This could be a significant resource saver.

Edit: The game Dark Souls uses a similar technique.