Optimizing my game... tilemap vs giant images

[Mercutio]

I am making a platformer, using Tiled and it occurred to me that I could make the tile layer just a collision layer and invisible.

then I could export the image of my level then draw on top of it in gimp.

then I can just load said paint over image into the game...

Now my question is: is this wise? I basically have a giant png loaded in the game(i suppose i can break it up a little). This way I can make a potentially prettier less tiling images as my level.

 

I made a quick test of the gigantic image and it didn't seem it affected much but then again its not like i measured fps or anything like that.

 

Also can I tell specific tiles to only check for collisions from their top? Kind of like mario platforms you can jump up to from directly below.

 

Thanks in advance

[B3L7]

I spent a long time in Phaser 2 working with your aproach because the tilemap renderer was very much inferior in Phaser 2. I was batching the png level to the vram using texture priority and it worked very well performance wise but I was constantly running into limits with the upper limits of texture sizes for the GPU. That coupled with the massively increased development time for not using tilemaps (re-exporting pngs every time a change was made, handling all the groups, objects, etc), I came to the conclusion that this was a ton of work when I was essentially optimizing my game in early development which is a big mistake.

Then I tested Phaser3's tilemap rendering and was blown away at how good the performance was. I came to the conclusion that it would be much better to use tilemaps in Phaser 3 and focus on developing the game and then swing back and worry about FPS close to the end. So far I found that Phaser3 can handle quite a complex scene with a good size tilemap and still performs great. Of couse a lot of this is dependent on your code and how big your tiles and map are.

 

In terms of one way collisions I haven't gotten that far in Phaser3 but it was fairly easy to do in phaser 2 with arcade physics. It looks like the functionality is there for arcade in Phaser 3:

https://photonstorm.github.io/phaser3-docs/Phaser.Physics.Arcade.Body.html#checkCollision

 

So I would look at this Phaser 2 example and see if you can replicate it using Phaser3's API:

https://phaser.io/examples/v2/arcade-physics/one-way-collision

 

If you do get it working make sure you share your code. ?