Ooook, so I reduced my tilesource image (and thus my tilesource)
From this
to this
And the “black screen” duration also decreased from 6-7s to ~2s… I could probably reduce it even more… and more and more (until there remains almost nothing in the tilesource image)… but my main objective is reached => understand why it took soooo long to load a collection that looked empty.
1/ Did you know that the tilesource size had such an impact on the collection “black screen” loading? Isn’t it a major issue for Defold?
Or maybe tilemaps are just not supposed to be used as I did? (this is why I was asking if there were best practices related to tilesource sizes, formats, dimensions (ex: power of 2) etc.)
==> if so, I think it would be helpful for new users (or just people who never used a tilemap before) to know what tilemaps should and shouldn’t be used for. And not only the “how”.
2/ ALL my game is built around tilemaps for now (for pathfinding purposes at first, but I found other applications over time), but it looks like I can’t afford to have “large” tilesources (I didn’t even know that my tilesource was large), so…
What do you think I should do?
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Option 1: spawn game objects based on tilemap data, instead of using tilemaps to represent everything in the game? I already do it to create my upgrade buttons, the bot formations in PvP battles and various other things… so I supposed i would be possible for the buildings etc.
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Option 2: have several tilemaps in the same collection, but with smaller tilesources? (ex: 1 tilemap for the ground, another for the buildings, the 2nd one being 1 pixel higher than the 1st one)
What do you think?
Would you recommend a mix between game objects and tilemaps for optimization purpose?