Hello everyone,

I'm programming a 2D zombieshooter with a perspective like GTA or Hotline Miami and I'm thinking about how to manage rotating the sprites. I don't know if it's better to create an image for every direction and preload them or rotating the images at runtime and have a more complicated collision detection. But in the first case maybe I have an overflow of RAM if the game has many moving objects.

Can you help me?

Cheers,

Mr. Moon

I don't think RAM is going to be an issue. Let's say you have 5 different zombie sprites, and you put up 100 zombies on the screen, 20 of each type. There's only 5 copies of the sprite in memory with 20 references to each.

Performance won't be an issue either since computers are so darn fast. Rotating a sprite with a matrix operation vs. having different direction sprites will be negligible. You'll be better off making this decision based on other factors such as: look and feel, art resource complexity, etc.

- Eck

I don't think RAM is going to be an issue. Let's say you have 5 different zombie sprites, and you put up 100 zombies on the screen, 20 of each type. There's only 5 copies of the sprite in memory with 20 references to each.

Performance won't be an issue either since computers are so darn fast. Rotating a sprite with a matrix operation vs. having different direction sprites will be negligible. You'll be better off making this decision based on other factors such as: look and feel, art resource complexity, etc.

- Eck

^^^^ This. Programmers are really bad at guessing where the problems are going to be in our software. Do the simple thing and test the FPS.

Also, don't forget that you can flip sprites, as well. :)