I've been playing around with making various visual effects in textmode (shifting the rgb of turfs over time to make an explosion or the shadow of an approaching meteor). The textual lighting library wasn't cutting it for me so I cooked up something a little more useful.

However, I remember seeing Spuzzum saying something about every change to the color of a turf causes each client to be sent 21 bytes (or bits?) which could cause the game to slow down even under a good connection.

For my textmode driving foray, this is apparent as my little block cars have headlights now to raise the RGB of all turfs in a small arc. If the arc is too big or the vehicle moves too fast the game starts to lag. Of course, the get_arc() proc could be 'unoptimized' to say the least but it's essentially a picky view() and doesn't look like a hog.

Does textmode offer faster performance than icons? And what are some of the limitations/things to know about optimizing it? Is that 21 bytes only for turfs, so I could use an object of layer TURF_LAYER+1 to make the change on instead (this might actually work out better when coordinating multiple effects on top of one another, as I see it)?

Or, short and simple, things to not do in textmode?