how do i get phaser / p2 to calculate only what's visible in the current camera view

[valueerror]

as i said in the title of this thread i think it could be useful for performance to stop p2 calculating every air and ground enemy even if it's 2000 pixels away from me..

 

in my game (and i think this is true for most jumpNrun platformer games) it would be absolutely ok if the enemies start walking a second before i see them in my current cameraview ..

 

lets say i have 10 enemies and 10 moving platforms on my map..  every step (60 times a second) phaser is calculating all of the objects on the map.. that means 1200 times per second every collision calculation presolve/narrophase whatsoever.. this must be bad for performance ? or are those calculations that simple that this doesn't count?

 

i thought it would be great to tell p2 to only calculate a specific rectangle around my player -- let's say 1000x800 pixels .. every enemy stays on it's place until this rectangle touches it..

 

is this already possible in phaser somehow??

[Kapsonfire]

YOu could check the range for the objects in update() and disable the collision check for objects that are outside of your rect

[valueerror]

yeah..that's what i'm asking for.. but is there a phaser way to do that? if not.. how do i do that?

i cant just disable collisions because then the other objects would fall of the screen.. i would ned something general like game.pause for everything outside of a defined rectangle around the player....

[Kapsonfire]

You could save the coords before removing collision and restore them afterwards

[valueerror]

hmmm...  i made a few tests..   i think i was wrong in one point..   the assumption that those p2 calculations of all my moving objects are the reason for the great performance drop on a less powerfull pc seems to be wrong..  p2 (or phaser) can handle quite a bunch of sprites moving around on their own, colliding with each other..  (at least enough for a simple platformer game)

 

i commented out everything in my game world that could waste cpu power (enemies, moving objects, backgrounds (parallax)...  but still - the moment i start moving my player and the camera starts scrolling i've got 30 - 40 frames instead of 60

 

so i thought about whats left..  my tilemap is the only thing left with a bunch of layers..  so i commented out 6 of the 7 layers and performance is top !    i made a special very big tilemap with as much independent tiles as i could get on the screen with only one layer and l... performance drops only 2 or 4 frames.. everything is still perfect..

 

so the outcome of my "research" is :

for json files created in tiled -  the number of layers is responsible for the scrolling performance  2 layers good! 6 layers bad!

 

 

since the original question of this thread seems interesting besides this new encountered problem i'm going to create a separate thread for the "layer problem"