Comments on: HTML5 Game Dev. Removing elements from the screen. Finding the fastest method.

By: swingpants

swingpants — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:28:32 +0000

Entirely agree. I’m building a game with many collectibles – I’ve gone with hide off-screen (but use as a pool) – then clear the screen at level end. I’ve certainly got my frame rate back to 60fps on my target devices after applying this method. Interesting to find out these ‘foibles’, but annoying that these simple actions aren’t trivial.
I guess fighting with the tech is an essential part of getting familiar with a new technology, but really I’d rather be concentrating on the job of making cool games.

By: Richard Davey

Richard Davey — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:52:18 +0000

This approach is massively dependant on what sort of game/interaction you’re creating, but based on the graphs above it seems that to me my approach would be to always hide off-screen and then run a removeChild sweep on all off-screen elements on a set interval / at known “low cpu” times. Sort of like your own garbage collection. Like I said it depends entirely on the situation, for example this approach wouldn’t work for say a nice particle burst as you need fast recycling going on. But for something slower / less intensive it should give a good trade-off.