Hello there!
I have some questions about performance.
1) Am I right that it will result in a better performance if I let the player object check if it is colliding with one of the hundreds of trees in my game instead of letting hundreds of trees check if they collide with the player object?
There is no difference, the number of collision checks (which you can see and test yourself in debug preview mode) remains the same. As mentioned above, optimize performance by using other conditions to narrow down the number of objects that need checking, by using within distance or is on screen or something similar.
2) For the tree falling animation I use the spin behavior and check if the tree is 1° to 90°, if so change it to a laying tree object so it will stop spinning. Am I right that it will have a better performance if I swap this tree to another unique tree object before the spinning part so that the eventing will only need to check trees that are actually falling instead of also checking all the hundreds of other trees degrees that are not currently effected from chopping? Or is it more demanding to destroy an object and let another spawn on its position?
I would use an instance variable to keep track of the state of the tree (0 for stationary, 1 for falling ect.).
3) I use player to tree collision checking to make the tree 50% opaque if the player is behind. For setting the tree back to 100% opacity I use "on every 0.2 seconds -> tree set opacity 100%". But this affects every tree. Is there a more elegant way to achieve this?
Use an "Else" event after an is overlapping event to set oacity to 100.
4) If I set an object to anothers child, it has better performance if I unselect as many of the "child-syncing" options as I can, right? Or do these only really take up performance if their parents are moving or changing their angles?
Not familiar with this, but the golden rule is that if you can't measure a difference yourself, its not worth worrying about!
Thank you in advance!