Does GameSalad use atlas sprites?

micah

To save memory and make things more efficient in game development I've always heard you should use atlas sprites, a single image that contains lots of frames. So like, for an animation, you're supposed to save each frame in a different chunk in the same image, and load them, and then cut it up in the program. It seems like this isn't possible with GameSalad and each frame just needs to be a different image, right?

And I'm just curious if anyone knows, does GameSalad end up putting animation frames on the same texture in memory, to make it as efficient as atlas sprites? This is mostly to satisfy my curiosity, thanks!

ktfright

I don't they have that yet. I Also want to ask what an an alas sprite can be used for.

micah

ktfright, well it's not really used any differently than if you just have several different sprites. The benefits are purely that it's more efficient. Basically, rather than holding several different image objects in memory and swapping between them each frame of an animation (dozens of times a second), it just holds all frames in a single object in memory and swaps between parts of that single object. But modern computers and iPhones are really quick, so unless you have a looot of animations going on at the same time the efficiency probably won't make much of a difference.

stanimation

They use a similar technique when texture mapping. Just one image that has a lot of different images on it. Then coordinates are used to move the one large image around to the correct positions.