How to make the game run faster (for the user): Set your display to 15 or 16 bits per pixels. Make the window smaller. Turn off alpha channel sprites (this will not give you hardware acceleration at the moment). For developers: Things that could be done faster (in order of importance): * Use some partitioning scheme to make collision detection be less than O(N^2). * Sprites that are just for display (ie effects) does not need masks or all of the features of regular sprites. Make them a separate type of object. * Enable hardware acceleration where possible. * Change alarms from O(nr waiting) to O(nr active) (ie to a sorted queue). Some profiling: Running 100000 frames without blitting (2 ai planes, about 20 mech objects, typical game scene) gives: real 0m29.486s user 0m22.230s sys 0m1.370s real 0m29.081s user 0m22.000s sys 0m1.440s This includes loading, converting, building masks etc. Looks like < 0.22 ms/frame. Pretty good imo. without cropping: real 0m33.266s user 0m25.710s sys 0m1.290s real 0m32.949s user 0m25.960s sys 0m1.460s With extra optimization (-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -foptimize-sibling-calls -march=i686) about 19s user time. With about 50 biplanes in a heap on the ground things look like Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds. % cumulative self self total time seconds seconds calls ms/call ms/call name 67.77 1.85 1.85 820213 0.00 0.00 bitmask_overlap_area 7.33 2.05 0.20 2096831 0.00 0.00 bitmask_overlap_pos 4.03 2.16 0.11 1083 0.10 1.81 sprite_group_coll 3.30 2.25 0.09 119823 0.00 0.00 sprite_move 2.20 2.31 0.06 77717 0.00 0.02 mech_sprite_collide 1.83 2.36 0.05 122195 0.00 0.00 animation_draw 1.47 2.40 0.04 678431 0.00 0.00 sprite_get_overlap On this machine this means approx 2us/overlap_area, 1us/overlap_pos.. This is an extreme situation, so it's probably nothing to worry about. This is without cropping.
