Sprite animation vs Tweening - performance question

[MattBrooklyn]

Hi all,

 

Been playing around with Phaser for a couple months now; really like it!

 

This might be more of a general game dev question, but either way I'm still wondering if anyone might have any insight on the following:

 

Which would be expected to perform better on mobile? Tweening the properties of a sprite/image, or animating through the frames of a sprite to achieve a similar effect.

 

For example, which would perform better?

a. Tweening the alpha, scale, tint of a sprite

b. Animating a sprite through frames that look similar to the  above described tween

 

Thanks for the help, and thanks for this great community.

 

Matt

 

 

 

 

[rich]

Hi Matt

 

Animation, definitely - depending on texture size though. As all it has to do is update a single draw call and not alter the transform.

[MattBrooklyn]

Thanks Rich. 

 

So then, would you say the same might apply to particles? If all I want is a simple particle explosion, would I get better performance by animating through the frames of a sprite with a rendered explosion, rather than use particles?

[rich]

A texture based animation will always be faster than actual particles, yes. But it's a trade-off. If you use too much memory with too large textures, then you'll cripple your game by exhausting device RAM. But on a technical level, yes, definitely faster.