have a poor understanding of memory load and an impatience for games that routinely crash, and figure maybe I can get help for at least one of those problems.
I have a type Coordinates with integer variables .X, .Y, .UU, .UV, .VU, .VV, .H, .K, .T which I've been using to keep track of moving sprites' intended destinations and configurations (for items that don't use physics, like alert boxes). It's convenient because I can assign a single variable to a collection of sprites and particle emitters that 'belong together' as part of one object.
Unrelatedly, I've also been trying to design a way to track mouse movement over time, to create a mousetrail on the screen. I'm planning to eventually create a program that evaluates how well a user traces around a circle with their mouse. For that, I've been using an array of type Coordinates[3600] to store the mouse pointer location each frame, for a maximum of sixty seconds. But in this case I only really need .X, .Y information per frame, which means I'm creating 25,200 integer variables that I'll never use.
Obviously I'm aware that I *can* create separate types, and will for this particular case, but this got me wondering just how careful and judicious I ought to be.
Will having AppGameKit create hundreds of thousands of empty initialized unused integer variables cause a significant memory/workload concern, on typical low-end mobile devices? Or do variables take up so little space individually that this is a drop in the bucket? Or does AppGameKit kind of ignore those variables until used?
I don't even know how to test the potential for problems, or the threshold for concern, since presumably any memory error would only occur when there's already a ton of sprites on screen and other stuff happening. All by itself, creating the array and filling its X and Y coordinates doesn't seem to cause any problems or slowdown.