Java Slick 2D get image pixel slow, any optimizations?

In Java using the Slick 2D API, I built a game which takes in a bitmap as its world. If a bitmap’s pixel’s alpha is 0, it is considered air where the character is free to roam around; otherwise, it is solid and they cannot move through.

On my PC, I was running it at 1% of my CPU usage. Then when I tried running it on my laptop, it peak开发者_运维百科ed its core and ran at 50% of my CPU usage.

After doing tests, I found out that the expansive function call was getting the image’s pixel Image.getColor(x, y). Here is the interesting part. I rebuilt this same example in C++ using Allegro 5, and on my laptop it was running at 3% rather than 50%.

Are there more efficient ways to obtain a pixel from an Image in Slick 2D?

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Convert the Image object into an array of pixel values and get the values from the array. Excessive amounts of method calls will slow down your program significantly.