A question about performance and memory

[Outcast]

I am trying to optimize my games as best as I can, especially when trying to target html5 mobile. There are many areas I don't really know how though and what is happening behind the scenes. I remember reading somewhere that if you have an active with a lot of animation frames in it it takes up a lot of memory and performance and that you could be better off to only have that object in the frame when really needed. This has me thinking of a situation I am in now:

I am doing a game where there will always be one hero and one enemy on the screen at all time, I am thinking about if I should do 20 different objects for every type of enemy and just have one of them created at one time. Or if I should just store all the different enemies in one single object and just play the appropriate animation one at a time. The last option would be more easy when it comes to the actual code since I only need to keep track of one object instead of 20, but I am thinking maybe it needs to load in all the 20 character animations at the same time though instead of just having 1 loaded at a time?

I hope i made myself clear what I am trying to explain..

[Julian82]

Hi outcast, due to my experience animations only eat up memory when they are actually called. I made this observation due to a tilemaking object I use for tiled map creation.

[Outcast]

What about using different animations like "stopped" "walking" "running" VS using a lot of direction in the "stopped" for example?

[Julian82]

In my case this made no difference, only the single frames that are actually called in the fastloop (and in my case pasted as backdrops) cause memory usage to change. I´m using both methods. I think it´s a bit like using an invisible object; no actual rendering of the animation frame = no memory for the graphics