TileMap and Performance (Other Methods?)

[Danceatron]

Hey Guys. I was doing some testing with TileMap in my shiny new platformer engine. I was hoping someone out there knew the answer to this question before I do a lot of reworking for just a chance of better performance.

I’m building my levels using TileMap. They are admittedly quite large. So I’m noticing that I start getting lag with more than 2 layers of graphics. Call me greedy, I’m building a 1080P game running at 60 FPS. The tiles are 50x50.

So, If I understand correctly, Tilemap is basically building a large image from the tiles, so each time I use Tilemap to make a layer of graphics, I’m making another large image, which Flash doesn’t care for.

So my question is: Would I get better performance by placing more smaller entities/graphics than I am now by using Tilemap to essentially make one large image for each layer? Would I even notice a difference?

[jacobalbano]

I’ll refer you here:

Tilemap performance is lacking? [SOLVED AS HELL]

The number of colors doesn't matter. A color is a color. You're stuck making software-blitted Flash games. If you had access to the GPU, your game would blaze420, no problem; however, you don't. If you scale the game up, you will get better performance. Why? First, when you scale the game up, your GPU is actually doing the scaling, not the FlashPunk engine. The slowdown you're seeing is due to FlashPunk doing all the great stuff it does every tick — drawing shit, checking to see if some shit r…

and here:

Tilemap performance is lacking? [SOLVED AS HELL]

The number of colors doesn't matter, the thing that's killing your performance is fillrate. When the engine goes to render, it has to send a minimum of screenWidth * screenHeight pixels to the display. If your window is 1920x1080, that's a little over 2 million pixels to stick on the screen. That's the best case scenario, and unless your world is completely empty, it's never going to happen. Now, you've got five of these images. With nothing else in the mix, that's 10 million pixels. Now c…

Long story short, 1080p is overreaching for a flash game. You can improve performance by drawing all of your tilemaps to a single Canvas and using that as a graphic, but it will only improve performance if your tilemaps aren’t changing very often.

[Danceatron]

That’s pretty much what I figured. Fortunately, I’ve been testing quite a bit, and I’m actually pretty pleased with the performance of Tilemaps at 720p /60fps. After all, smooth operation is more important for action games.

I think I’ll give the Canvas method a shot. I’m not changing the Tilemaps much at all. Any performance boost is welcome.

Thanks for the confirmation!