[wedge_]

Hey everyone,

I'm currently developing a puzzle type of game. The game is basically ready, but there are some draw performance issues I am facing with certain devices. The problem areas performance wise in my game are (emulated) floating point calculations (non avoidable) and drawImage calls..

Basically game looks like this:

--------
|YYGGBB|
|RRDDVV|
|      |
|      |

In certain cases player is able to remove blocks from the game (the purpose), and blocks fall off the board, so say those 2 'B' blocks are removed from left upper corner, these blocks will fall from the screen, and so forth.
The problem is that when on board there are say, 60 different blocks, and multiple blocks are falling off, they need to be painted, and a block that is under a falling block needs to repainted too so it doesn't get corrupted. Currently as I don't know which blocks (in the block array) will get under (falling movement is randomized, they don't just drop down) so I need to draw all the blocks on the field (and the background of the board) to get uncorrupted image.

As one can imagine, this can cause up to 60 calls/frame to drawImage, to draw all the images, and this creates lag on certain devices.

I have been thinking of collision detection between dropping and static blocks, to see which blocks need redrawing, but I'm not sure if there could be something more efficient, still doing collision detection between 10 falling blocks and 50 static ones will cause alot of calculations too (10[falling balls] * 4[values to check] * 50[static balls to check against] = 2000 comparisons)

Somehow I still think it's possible to make more efficient drawing engine than just shitloads of drawImage calls, looking at some professional games that are out there, they seem to have heaps of sprites on the screen and still run smooth.

I've been wondering if it's possible to use System.arraycopy to an offscreen image somehow from byte information of images and then just drawing one image to the screen.. ? If someone could point to some advanced rendering tips or a book I would appreciate that..

Thanks for the trouble