CODEWITHSUNDEEP
optimizationcocos2d-iphone
Daniel
Daniel

Reputation: 31559

SpriteSheet, AtlasSprite, Sprite and optimization

I'm developing an iPhone Cocos2D game and reading about optimization. some say use spritesheet whenever possible. others say use atlassprite whenever possible and others say sprite is fine.
I don't get the "whenever possible", when each one can and can't be used?
Also what is the best case for each type?
My game will typically use 100 sprites in a grid, with about 5 types of sprites and some other single sprites. What is the best setup for that? guidelines for deciding for general cases will help too.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 348

Answers (1)

makdad
makdad

Reputation: 6450

Here's what you need to know about spritesheets vs. sprites, generally.

A spritesheet is just a bunch of images put together onto one big image, and then there will be a separate file for image location data (i.e. image 1 starts at coordinate 0,0 with a size of 100,100, image 2 starts at coordinate 100,0, etc).

The advantage here is that loading textures (sprites) is a pretty I/O and memory-alloc intensive operation. If you're trying to do this continually in your game, you may get lags.

The second advantage is memory optimization. If you're using transparent PNGs for your images, there may be a lot of blank pixels -- and you can remove those and "pack" your texture sizes way down than if you used individual images. Good for both space & memory concerns. (TexturePacker is the tool I use for the latter).

So, generally, I'd say it's always a good idea to use a sprite sheet, unless you have non-transparent sprites.

Upvotes: 1

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