Hello everyone,
MTE 0v990 (appendMap, etc) will be landing in a few days. I’m just finishing up some updates to the documentation. I’ll include the Coronastein3D files as well for those of you who want to play around with them. Once that’s up I’ll start working through the backlog of questions and requests and give them more time and attention.
Kumarks, the getTilesWithProperty function returns tile display objects. MTE achieves its performance advantages over older frameworks by culling offscreen tile objects. That is why the function only loops through the space defined by masterGroup[layer].vars.camera; there are no tile objects outside of the that space. I’ll have more by way of suggested alternatives for you tomorrow.
Azmar, each sprite and object comes with performance overhead. The more sprites and objects you add to a map, the lower the performance. 0v990 supports culling of Tiled objects (polygons, shapes, free-placed tiles) which will improve performance on maps with large numbers of these objects at the expense of higher memory usage.
Offscreen physics was meant mostly for a small number of critical sprites, not every sprite on a map. It increases the number of tiles and physics objects the hardware has to handle at any given time, which decreases overall performance- quite significantly in some cases. For example, ten sprites overlapping each other offscreen will only need a small number of tiles around themselves. This is easy and fast. However when those sprites all move away from each other, the engine has to maintain enough tiles to surround each one; so ten times more tiles. This is not so fast. The performance situation is one of those “there’s no free lunch” situations: nothing is free, every object in an app takes processing power and memory to maintain, even when it is sitting motionless offscreen.
Let’s try it!