How should i delete objects?

[Tufan]

Should i set variables to null after removing them? Is it a good practice?

I have 2 states: load and play. I want to delete "Loading..." text when switching state to play but loadingText variable is always Phaser.Text object if i dont set it to null.

My current code is:

^{var loadingText;}

^{// load state}

^{loadingText = game.add.text(...);}

^{// ...end of load state}

^{game.world.remove(loadingText);}

^{game.state.start("play");}

Should i set loadingText variable to null to free memory?

[jjwallace]

Removing the text object would clear up more memory.  I am not sure how much actually its going to save though.

[samme]

You don't really have to. When you switch states the world gets cleared and the memory will eventually get released.

[Tufan]

3 hours ago, samme said:

When you switch states the world gets cleared...

But the variable won't be cleared automatically, i think removing object would help a bit.

 

[samme]

You can't free memory directly in JS, you can only remove references.

In your case, setting loadingText to null makes no difference because the loadingText reference disappears once the function exits. It doesn't erase the object, which is still in game.world.children somewhere. After Phaser clears the world, there are no more references to the the text object and it eventually passes into oblivion.