A question on displaying an image multiple times

[ZBoyer1000]

Is it better to display the same image at multiple positions than to create new images with the same texture?

[Nixola]

Yes. Creating new images with the same texture is literally just a waste of video memory, you can just get one image and draw it in different locations.

[AnRu]

Also a good point is using spritebatches. They can produce performance with equal images.
Also take a look at AutoBatch

[Jasoco]

Yes. Creating new images with the same texture is literally just a waste of video memory, you can just get one image and draw it in different locations.

Is it? Actually I was wondering this myself because I thought that Lua was smart in that any duplicate data just gets referenced. So you create a variable with some data, then create more variables with duplicate data, but Lua would instead just make those subsequent variables references to the original. So wouldn't the same thing happen with images? You create an image, then create more with the same file, won't it know this and just reference it?

[zorg]

Well, for images, lua won't, but i haven't checked löve's source whether that checks previously loaded images or not.

[Positive07]

Nope! When you call love.graphics.newImage, LÖVE grabs some memory, reads the file, loads the image, stores it in memory, creates Lua userdata, pass it to the Lua code, the userdata is unique always, the memory alocation is also unique because LÖVE doesn't memoize which images you have loaded or not and can't check if two images look the same because the comparison would imply checking every pixel, its red, green, blue and alpha component.

So creating new images, fonts or whatever, is slow, takes memory and is not something you should do continuosly but once

Drawing is less silly, the data is already in memory so drawing is just telling the GPU, put this here in the screen, but GPU calls can be a bottleneck when you are drawing thousands of stuff to the screen, so that is where spritebatches come in, they tell the GPU, put this image here and here and here and ... in the screen.

[pgimeno]

Depends on how you use it. If you do a=love.graphics.newImage('image'), then b=a, then yes, you've got two references to the same image. But if you do a=love.graphics.newImage('image'), then b=love.graphics.newImage('image'), you will end up with two distinct copies. Same if you do a={ }; b={ }. Lua only checks if two things are equal (in order to store references rather than copies) if they are strings: doing a='string'; b='string' is equivalent to doing a='string'; b=a. Keeping track of whether a string has been already used is probably a significant part of the reason why strings are slow to manipulate in Lua (but fast to compare, because only the references are compared).

Easy enough to check with tables and images:

Code: Select all

local lgNewImage = love.graphics.newImage
print(lgNewImage('image.png') == lgNewImage('image.png')) -- prints false

a = {}
b = a
print(a == b) -- prints true
a[1] = 3
print(b[1]) -- prints 3

c = {}
d = {}
print(c == d) -- prints false
c[1] = 3
print(d[1]) -- prints nil

[Jasoco]

Interesting. I learned something. Not that I ever tried to do it the way I said, but I'm glad to know that it definitely wouldn't conserve memory.