Temporus

Background performance and physics.

When you start off making a platformer, you only need a few objects. A player, a platform and some enemies maybe, or maybe just traps.

The background can be pretty simple, repeating and maybe you throw in some parallax for good measure. One problem I have run into is the problem with complexity and performance. For most platformers you save a lot of memory space with repeating tiles. Super Mario brothers is a prime example. 

Where the cloud and the bush are the same object just with a different color fill or mask on it. My issue was that I found the amount of tiles I wanted to use became somewhat overwhelming. This along with the fact I wanted more complicated mechanics such as physics etc. When you have 50K tiles with physics and many different kinds, it starts to become difficult to manage. To save on CPU at the expense of memory I decided on a different approach. Map out the levels in a tile tool, export the level as a PNG and then put that png into the game. I then add a few boundary tiles to make it look like the backgrounds are really solid. It is an illusion. Next step to help with memory management was to break up the background into smaller chunks. I am still looking for a way to manage these chunks as a larger level can be 50-100 chunks. You end up with pieces like this.