Designing rooms - with sprites

[Mert]

Hi.

I have never designed my room with placing things around rooms, so I've just decided to do it that way in my new project.

By creating an "Asset Layer", I can simply drag & drop sprites to my room. I used to do it manually with code, but this is way more comfortable and good. I can also create "Tile Layers", which is actually the same thing, but allows me to divide sprites into smaller parts and place them.

My questions is;

• What's the logic, like when I put the sprite with that, what Game Maker does behind the scene?
• Edit : And performance. Any experiences?

 

[rIKmAN]

I've not done much performance testing with asset layers because I've never had to as they've never caused an issue, however based off posts from Nocturne in other threads I've read previously using sprites on asset layers has very little overhead as they are just sprites that get drawn.

Splitting sprites into tiles and placing them that way would also be very fast (because GMS2 tiles are proper tiles unlike GMS1) and also would allow you to do tile based collisions, add/remove tiles at runtime, change out entire tilemaps etc - the typical use cases for tiles.

Generally the usual way would be to use a combination of both (depending on your game) where in something like a platformer you would use tiles for the collidable parts and then use asset layers to place eye candy sprites and break up the "grid" based look that tile games can have and make it look a bit more organic.

 

[Yal]

Tile layers are grouped together as a single object that shares resources, so they're more efficient when you need a lot of small sprites. This is (among some other things) because they're on a grid, so there's a reason the grid is enforced.