I was searching through the forums out of curiosity and I came across hardly any results on the matter. We have implemented an array obstacle detection system for static objects. Why has no one else thought of this? It handles hundreds of moving enemies checking hundreds of static obstacles at 45-55 FPS and I'm sure it can still be improved because my array checks are quite plentiful at the moment and could stand to be cut down a bit. With using collisions in this same setting, we were over one million collision checks per second for enemies and obstacles alone, even with disabling collisions for things off screen and such, which of course slowed the game down to 14fps or worse even on my computer that isn't a weak computer.
I just wonder why this alternative to collision checks hasn't been brought up before much. It works quite well after we set up the image points to handle "collisions" on the array.