Spawn Sprites as they get close to player

[GregDev]

Hi,

I'm making a game where the player traverses through a fairly large area and occasionally encounters enemy sprites.

I'm adding around 50 enemy sprites at game start and I'm noticing some performance drops, when I remove the enemy sprites the performance is fine.  

There's only about 5 sprites on screen at once, so I'm trying to figure out the best way to spawn enemies as they enter camera range.

 

After reading  http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/16191-is-it-possible-to-make-an-sprite-re-spawn-after-a-short-time/

It looks like creating a handful of sprites and using revive() or changing their x/y coordinates as the player moves around the world is a viable option, but I was wondering if there was another way to do it that doesn't result in a good deal of refactoring for me.

Any ideas to save me some time?

[veggis]

In your game are the enemies scattered around the map outside of the camera boundaries? If so enabling autoculling on the enemy sprites might solve some performance hits. https://photonstorm.github.io/phaser-ce/Phaser.Component.AutoCull.html

If the enemy class do alot in its update method then that might be a problem too. Killing and reviving the enemy when outside camera boundaries is another solution. You should look into object pooling.

http://www.melkybee.com/blog/2015/05/17/object-pooling-example-in-phaser/

[Refeuh]

I do something similar - I have a single large area for my entire game, and thousands of entities of various types. I "suspend" all entities that are not relevant to the player (basically I put them in a frozen state, by disabling elements and pausing behaviours). You need to keep some logic running for certain entities to allow things like "opening a distant door remotely", mostly message processing. I also use a FlyWeight pattern to share as much data as possible between entities of the same type. And object pooling too, to minimise the cost of destroying/creating entities ; just re-use pre-allocated ones.

[GregDev]

Thanks guys! 

My enemies are outside the camera boundaries so I tried enabling autoCull on all my sprites, there was a slight performance increase but not as significant as what I was hoping for.

I also tried messing around with kill/revive by putting all the enemies in an array and calling this in the update loop

    function checkSpawn(game){
        for(var i =0; i< this.enemyArr.length;i++){
            var distance = player.y - this.enemyArr[i].y;
            if(distance < 1000 && distance > -1000){
                this.enemyArr[i].revive();
            }else{
                this.enemyArr[i].kill();
            }
        }
    }

This actually worked pretty well, but I'm weary of performance hits as enemyArr grows.

 

There is a moderate amount of work for each sprite in it's update loop, so it looks like pooling might be the way to go.

 

One thing I noticed was each sprite's update method is called regardless if alive/renderable is true or false. It's too bad there's no way to stop a sprite from updating without using destroy()