As part of the plan of Wave Engine 2.0 to check over its features and following a process to constantly improve them, the new Wave Visual Editor gave us the opportunity to simplify a lot of things and make the development more enjoyable. One of them is the creation and use of sprite sheets textures and animating them.
What is a Sprite Sheet
If you are not familiarized with Sprite Sheets, don’t worry, this article will give you a brief explanation.
First of all we must differentiate between sprite, sprite sheet and animation concepts.
- Sprite is just a single 2D image, which can be added to our scene.
- Sprite Sheet is a group of different sprites put together into a one big image. They are necessary to speed up the process of displaying images on the screen because of its important impact on memory and performance. Packing algorithms are really important to keep the image as small as possible.
- Animation with sprites is using a sprite sheet and changing which sprite is rendered, changing every frame causing the animation illusion.
They are 2 key uses for the sprite sheets in your game or application:
- Sprite animations. For creating a 2D animated character (or object), so we have to pack all its frames as a way to make it easy to add on your project.
- Sprite Packaging. Using a sprite sheet with no animation, just to optimize memory and performance. We usually packs a lot of our scene sprites into a sprite sheet, and we use them in our scene, adding a sprite sheet but rendering only one of its sprites.
The new Wave Engine sprite sheet format is designed to satisfy all of them.