Graphics

[Yakkity]

I'm trying to generate a background 'map' using sprite tiles from an Image object and rendering the individual tiles thus :

Stopwatch sw=new Stopwatch();
sw.Start();
for(int y = 0; y < MapHeight; y++)
{
   for(int x = 0; x < MapWidth; x++)
   {
        int imgNum = m_MapData[x, y];
        m_RenderedMapImage.DrawImage(m_Tiles.Crop(new ImageRect(imgNum*MAP_BLOCK_SIZE,0,MAP_BLOCK_SIZE,MAP_BLOCK_SIZE)), pos);
                    pos.X += MAP_BLOCK_SIZE;
   }
                
   pos.X = 0;
   pos.Y += MAP_BLOCK_SIZE;
}
Console.WriteLine ("Map draw took {0} ms", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds);

 

But after profiling this for a 19 x 13 tile map (247 tiles) it is taking around 850 ms to render the map image. Is there a more efficient of doing this that I am missing? I have toyed with using a SpriteList but worry about performance at runtime.

What is the best way of off-screen rendering?  Can I use GameEngine2D and render a SpriteList to an off-screen graphics buffer?

Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated

[ShinNali]

The Imaging libraries probably wasn't made for real time stuff, so I'd use SpriteList or RawSpriteTileList. They're made to batch up all the sprites you pass into the list and draw them all in one call (caveat is they all have to refer to the same texture, so your tileset would have to be in one texture), which is something PSS seems to prefer.

If your tilemap doesn't change in the scene, you can just call your tilemap drawing thing once and load the image into a texture and just draw that.

[Yakkity]

Thanks for your advice. Curently I do indeed do as you suggest to render the tilemap and load the image into a texture - so for normal gameplay, this works just fine.

The issue with the performance is on the game's configuration page you can customise which 'levels' you want active by tapping a thumbnail preview of the level, and so I thought I could simply re-use the tilemap renderer function and draw a thumbnail of each map onto a gridlist. Sadly it takes about a minute to render 60 thumbnails !

I think for now I will use pre-rendered thumbnails