phaser performance, particles vs atlas animation

[kriket]

How performant is it to use an atlas over using a particle emitter do you reckon?

 

Has anyone performed a test on this? I googled but couldnt find anything. 

[JakeCake]

How are they in any way the same thing?

 

A texture atlas is a way to pack textures together to reduce texture bindings on the graphics unit, while a particle emitter is a way to spawn sprites. It's like comparing how efficient it is to zip a movie compared to playing it in VLC or Quicktime. Two very different things, or am I missing something.

[chongdashu]

I suppose what you're saying is whether it would be better to use an atlas frame-based animation vs a particle emitter. For example, maybe for something like a puff of smoke you might consider a 10-frame animation of a growing ball of smoke particles vs. actually spawning 10 growing balls of smoke?

 

Disclaimer: Just my thoughts, not 100% sure if it's true.

 

If this is what you mean, the frame-based animation will probably be a little bit faster compared  to the particle system (blitzing sequences of images vs computing positions and updating them). However, the particle-based system will give more flexibility in terms of how the puffs of smoke can move (and react with the environment). And if your smoke particles are all from the same texture (or part of a texture), I doubt you will find a big discrepancy in the performance if your particle count is low.

[jmp909]

you can also animate individual particles from an atlas  

http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/15291-how-to-animate-particle-in-particle-engine/

 

can you explain what you're actually trying to do