I have some effects like fog and a spinning effect using the attached artwork.
My game is 1600 x 900 native. these artwork are made with that resolution in mind. However, some players, brower and phones cant handle it and FPS drops alot.
These artwork cover up the whole screen and beyond and are semi transparent using alpha channel 6 and are scaled up and down for effect or even rotated.
I was wonder, will scaling down the artwork and then using draw method scale to scale it back up will improve the FPS loss?
Most likely yes, but honestly you'd just have to test it. That's not unique to OpenBOR BTW. That, to this day, is just how coding and design work. You can simulate and work the math all you want, but only unit testing will say for sure.
Honestly, you're really just asking a lot of the devices trying to run a native resolution like that and then filling it with full screen effects. I've said before the engine can do it, but that doesn't mean the hardware can. Modern games (especially mobile and sprite based games) very rarely native high res. They run 720p or lower and scale up. You can do that in OpenBOR - I even did a live coding session on how, but at this point in your development, it would be a tough row to hoe.
Understanding what resolution is, and how it affects your game.
If it were stage tiles, I can think of all kinds of ways to optimize, but for burst effects like this? Other than scaling them like you suggested I'm not certain. I'll do some thinking.
looks like some sort of tiling trickery is back on the menu.....
if the effects ara basically like a video of sorts that cover the screen, maybe instead of using draw method effects you could pre-render a video/animation frames and tile it - you could also use some script so the "videos" can have a variety of animations so the effect gets a more "real time rendered" illusion , but it all depends on how those effects work and if they make use of offsets or such other fancy stuffs....
for reference - see how the nintendo 64 had some full screen graphics (menus on some wrestling games) that where made up of a lot of tiles
