Forums » Help » Performance concerns. Big map, big canvas, lots of entities etc.

I havent afforded the impact.js yet (you'll only be able to do so 2 weeks from now) so I couldn't test it myself and that's why I'm asking you guys.

I'm planning on building a top-down action rpg, with a ~960x540 canvas, and a level that is about 4 times this size -> 1920x1080. I'll have 9 scenes this big in the game (w/ transition between them, of course), plus some smaller indoor areas. The game is intendend to run on desktop browser only (the game is enterily based on quick keyboard interaction, so mobile is a distant reallity).

Besides that, the player character spritesheet will have at least 120 ~28x28 poses, couple dozen enemies (in up to 8 variations) wandering per area, up to a hundred entity scenery trees (that can be cut down and drop woodlog, fruits etc.). Not sure yet on how it could influence the frame rate, but the character will not be able to traverse the area very quickly.

Right now, I'm running a proof of concept on pure canvas/js using recursive animation, but I'm not on this scale yet (very small spritesheet and tilesets, with some bgm and sfx going on) - and I'm already meeting some hick ups on slower machines (like my 2007 entry model Macbook), tho I havent done much optimization yet.

Do you think that this scenario is easy for Impact.js to handle at a good framerate on modern/updated browsers running in a >2008 laptop machine, for instance? Or I'll have to go into optimization strategies myself?

Thanks in advance, and If I wasn't clear in some point, please let me know.

Although impact does have some ways to optimize things a bit for better performance it's still limited by the (ever-increasing) performance of canvas in the first place. If you are seeing performance issues in what you want to do already it's likely Impact will struggle as well.

I guess what I'm saying is it's not really Impact that is at fault when it comes to a lot of the performance issues of HTML 5 games, its just the limitations of canvas right now.

I do full-screen with my game... and I have to be very careful how many draw calls I'm doing.

Thanks for your answer Graphikos. Right I'm running some stress tests with the MelonJS using the Tiled Level Editor. And it's doing really good.

In a 4k x 4k scene, in a 960x540 canvas, flooded with 200 simple AI enemies, using fairly big spritesheets and tilesets and it's doing fine on my old macbook (running 60fps with some hick ups). I believe I wont have much problem with impact as well.