Level budget

A phone comfortably holds about 1000 shapes in one frame, a weak PC 5000-10000. Overdraw costs more than the count: translucent things over the whole screen, layer upon layer

How many shapes a device holds

What counts is shapes alive at the same time in one frame. The numbers are approximate, but the order of magnitude is right

Test on the weakest device you can reach. On your own PC everything will be fine, and that means nothing

Text and effects

Text and effects are counted in shapes too

Text: from 2 to 100 shapes per text object. The cost depends on the complexity of the font, the number of characters, the number of styles and whether the text is animated

Effect: 10 shapes for the object itself plus 0.1 shapes for each particle. An effect with a thousand particles is about 110 shapes

Overdraw

What costs a lot is not the count but overdraw. That is when the same pixel is painted again and again

What follows from this:

• one translucent fill over the whole screen costs more than a hundred projectiles
• layers of translucent decoration on top of each other are the most expensive thing you can build
• if the level lags, look for what covers the whole screen instead of counting objects

Opaque and translucent

A shape has a choice of draw path: Auto, Opaque, Transparent. The opaque path is cheaper: the GPU throws away covered pixels in advance

Auto decides by itself, once at load. Its hard condition is to never change how the level looks. Anything that cannot be proven opaque becomes translucent

Capacity hint

On save, the level records how many objects its heaviest frame needed. This is a hint for the loader, not a limit. A generator recalculates it

Next: Mobile devices, Images and fonts