Hi SFML community! I have few questions. Since they are somewhat elementary, I am extremely sorry if they have been covered but I just spent a good chunk of time on Google and here searching for answers and didn't find one. If this has been covered in many past topics, I would be grateful for perhaps the right keywords so I can conduct better searching and not bug you all.
I have a 16x16 source image that I want to appear as 32x32 in my game. Which will yield better performance: letting SFML scale a 16x16 image or scaling up the image beforehand to 32x32? A few words on "why" would be appreciated in the extreme.
I want to have "special effects" graphics in my game that basically use single-colored filled rectangles to make simple "explosions". For an example of what I'm going for, here are two frames from Yoshi's Island:
1 and
2. My question is, what yields better performance: using images as textures for this effect or doing it using SFML's fillrect functionality?
I know people here fiercely pounce on "unanswerable questions" but I am also wondering in general how many SFML rectangles and sprites (let's say 16x16, 8 colors) I can draw on screen per frame before slowdown, assuming I limit to 60 fps? I know it depends on the computer, so if you don't want to give me a common sense ballpark answer just tell me what specs I should know about before asking the question so I can try to research for myself. I don't need to know "1347 sprites" or "6548.3 rectangles", just ballparks so I can keep that in mind when designing my games. Eventually I will obviously run my own performance tests for my specific applications.
Last thing: I posted these as one topic but should I separate these into multiple threads? I included both in the topic name so that they can be found by search easily, I don't want to clutter the boards, but I am happy to edit and repost as multiple threads if that is better for everyone. I want to be a good poster here and not earn some of the rather sharp answers I see silly questions get. Thanks!
