Hey there!
The case goes like this:
I have a collection that contains a few game objects.
One of them always has a tween animation for the “y” position—this is a ping-pong loop that makes it look like it’s floating in the air.
Then, another game object in my collection is always spinning, and here come my two options:
Option 1 – Make the object rotate with a tween (euler.z).
Option 2 – Use sprite.play_flipbook with 15 sprites animating the rotation.
I ran a stress test with 1000 instances at the same time.
I’m no expert with the profiler, but the only noticeable change I saw was in “Sim”—the tween animations are a few milliseconds higher and a bit more spiky. (With 2000 instances, this is even more noticeable.)
At the end of the day, both cases don’t look that different on my PC, but on my phone (Sony XA2), the sprite version is noticeably better.
If I had to answer the question, I’d say that the sprite.play_flipbook version is a bit more performant, but I’d like to hear if you guys have any opinions on this.
And also, very importantly, I don’t think the game would ever have 1000 instances like those at the same time. Not even 100.
I know that, generally speaking, I shouldn’t worry about performance until it becomes an issue, and I’m not, but my team was asking about this. 