I'm about to place some character portraits into my game for dialogue sequences. These will be displayed as the User Animations of an active object.
My questions is, would it be best to have every character portrait (there are a lot) in the Active Object, and have that active object in every frame, even where certain portraits are not used? Or should I have only have the portraits I need in a modified version of that active object for each frame?
Which is the best method, performance/memory wise? Or is there not really any difference?
Having just one object with all the portraits would make the level load slightly slower, as all the portraits would be loaded at the start of the frame, whether they are needed or not.
Having multiple objects containing different portraits would make the file size slightly larger, as you'd have some duplicate portraits.
The latter would probably be preferable, but I doubt it's worth the extra hassle.
You could use an Active picture object instead and have a "sprite sheet" of the character portraits. Use the active picture object to display a specific portion of the sprite sheet.