iOS 7 Game Development by 2014

Author:2014
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Packt Publishing

What is a texture atlas?

To understand what a texture atlas is, check the figure following this section. As you can see, an atlas is an image that contains many subimages. Our game is able to access certain images in a texture atlas due to a special configuration file that keeps the coordinates of each image in a texture atlas.

Before Xcode 5 and Sprite Kit, you had to use third-party tools in order to create texture atlases, but now, all you need to do is create a folder named name.atlas, where the name can be anything; add images to it and add that into your project in Xcode. Xcode will handle everything for you transparently, and you won't have to worry about plists, coordinates, efficiency, and everything else.

Benefits that texture atlases provide are as follows:

All drawing from one atlas can be processed in one draw call, thereby increasing performance dramatically.

If your image has empty space, it will be cropped, and when you need the image, it will be restored. This way, you save memory, and your applications are smaller, which is a good thing.

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