Spriter and Construct 2

Hi guys,

This is a question for the Scirra guys and lucid, and I think some of us who are thinking about using Spriter with Construct 2 might be interested in knowing about. Since Spriter takes animation to a 'cut-out-like' approach, saving on graphics memory, I take it that more CPU is needed for body part movement while the Spriter sprite is animating. My question is, how significant is the impact of using a Spriter sprite vs. a regular sprite? If we have a given machine that can draw 100000 sprites 60FPS in Chrome, how many given Spriter sprites can the same machine animate/draw 60FPS using the same browser?

Well you can always export your animation from spriter into a series of png images so it would effectively turn back into a regular sprite animation (but probably with a lot more frames)

That's a good fallback to keep in mind.. I'm hoping the hit - if there is any at all - will be a very minimal thing.

I doubt there is any significant performance impact to moving the sprites around - and it will use vastly less memory than making animation frames. So I don't think there's anything to worry about here.

How about on mobile via cocoon? How well is it likely to perform given how minimalist you need to be with the sprite counts?

Do all the elements count as individual objects or do they get stitched together and stored in memory temporarily? For example, if I wanted to use it to dynamically create words from PNG letters, would a 5 letter word count as 5 sprites or be held in memory as 1 sprite?

Not being proficient in javascript, I've always wondered whether it is possible to stitch images together (efficiently)on the fly to count as 1 image (in the way you can with GD functions in PHP), or whether that's just how the system deals with rendering static images anyway.

Nathan - the textures are in memory, and take up the same amount of memory regardless of how many instances you have of them, though more instances will use more memory for their other data (variables, etc). To 'stitch' (paste is more like it) multiple images together, you can use rojohound's canvas plugin.