Hello all, I have a question about approaching spritesheets. Let me add a little bit of an explanation. I am currently working on a top down 2D style game and am programming a class for handling animations. I was wondering if there is a difference performance wise with using a single “master” spritesheet for each character or having a separate spritesheet for each animation (a file for idle animation, a file for running, attacking, etc). Is one approach better than the other performance wise? I would imagine that the single file approach is better because the game will have to load less, but larger files. Please correct me if I am wrong. Thank you!
It shouldn’t make much of a performance difference unless you’re using one spritesheet for the entire game or you’re using lots of assets, in which case the game may take a bit longer to build. I think that’s up to personal preference. What I do is I put all of a character’s animations onto one spritesheet, and then code them into individual animations.
Thank you for your insight!
Happy to help. (:
You want to pack as much as you can into a sprite sheet unless a characters entire animation set won’t fit if you can fit two or three reasonably on sprite sheet you should especially if you are relying on spritebatch.
The texture switching can start to add up if your game gets big…
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I was thinking the same thing. I will set my animation class to work with single spritesheets…seems to be the better approach. Plus, now I won’t have a ton of different spritesheets to draw haha
One warning i should of said be mindful of the systems you are targeting don’t make sheets so big that say a android phone can’t load them if that’s where you game is heading for.
Other then that fit in as much as you can per sheet provided it can stay grouped up per character and or level.
You don’t want to have 5 levels and 5 sprite sheets with random stuff all over if all of a levels images and characters. If they can fit on just a couple sheets, sort of group things up logically as much as you can. Things that are shared across levels try to keep in the a common set of spritesheets ect.
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Thanks for the advice!