JavaFX: Moving hundreds of ImageViews simultaneously inside a Pane (Performance problems)

Question

I am currently developing a tower defence game for a university project. At higher waves there are hundreds of enemies moving arround. My problem is that it's getting very inperforment at about 300+ enemies moving simultaneously. Every enemy is a children of a Pane which is displayed in my scene.

I've got a method in my EnemyGraphics class which updates the positon by calling the update method:

    public class EnemyGraphics extends ImageView implements EventObserver {

...
    @Override
    public void update() {
            Platform.runLater(() -> {
                    relocate(enemy.getxCoordinate(), enemy.getyCoordinate());
            });
    }
    }

I guess it's getting laggy because every enemy is updating its location on its own every time it moves by calling update().

Is there a way that I can set new coordinates for my ImageView object, without redrawing the scene and in the main FX-Thread creating a timer which redraws the entire scene in a certain interval? Or is there a other solution / method I can call to move images performantly over the pane?

Answer 1

Ok I've found my mistake. Everytime my enemyLogic class compute a new position it called the enemyGraphic object to update its position. During testing I've removed the functionality of the method in the enemyGraphics class but not the call.

To update the postions of all the enemys I've written a method in my GUIcontroller class:

private void startUpdateTicker() {
    final AnimationTimer timer = new AnimationTimer() {
        @Override
        public void handle(long timestamp) {
                updateEnemies();
        }
    };
    timer.start();
}

public synchronized void updateEnemies() {
        for (EnemieGUI enemy : enemyList) {
            enemy.relocate(enemy.getEnemie().getxCoordinate(), enemy.getEnemie().getyCoordinate());
        }
}