Sprite Maps Supported ?

`Allo all...

New to Construct 2. Been doing the tutorials, reading the manual, and yes, reading the forums.

The Q to which I have not found the answers to...

Can I utilize sprite maps such as would be exported from codeandweb.com/texturepacker

Will Construct2 compile the discreet pieces [sprites] into a power^2 sheet behind the scenes without my intervention? Dissecting the project and export folders, this doe not seem to be the case.

I really want to use sprite maps of my own creation and not a folder full of separate images. Can it be done ?

It is my long understanding that power^2 sprite maps are the performance champs when it comes to optimizing draw calls, file size, browser requests, etc...

Perhaps this is a feature request: Support for sprite maps & data output from TexturePacker [XML/JSON/CSS/PlainText/More...]

Thanks for reading.

I really want to use sprite maps of my own creation and not a folder full of separate images. Can it be done ?

This may help you.

Hey, thanks for the quick reply. Not exactly the answer I was looking for though.

Sprite maps only supported for animated sprites? Did I read that right?

The thing is... I do not want the engine to decide what is best for me. I want that control.

All points mentioned in the article are easily overcome by sane design and delivery strategies. Granted, it IS easier just to let a computer program do it for you... But when one can do it better than that program, it is frustrating that one is not given that opportunity.

So regardless of whatever decisions the developers made, I still want to import my own sprite maps and associated data.

Perhaps a look into the Javascript SDK might yield a glimmer of hope.

Hi there,

You might want to look at this post...

Regards,

Shawn

I haven't seen any evidence anyone can beat Construct 2's automatic spritesheeting and PNG recompression with other tools. If you can show me something that beats it by a significant margin I'd be interested to know which tools you used. As the blog Knifegrinder linked to says, C2's automatic spritesheeting on export is very good, and there is not much to gain by doing anything differently. For example putting two completely unrelated images in the same spritesheet usually has little compression benefit, because there is not anything in common between the images that PNG can compress away. Compare that to animation frames, where there is often a lot of in-common image sections which can be compressed away, and it's more likely that PNG-8 can be used for further savings, whereas unrelated images may nudge it over 256 colors and use PNG-32 which can double the filesize.

Also have a look at Image compression in Construct 2, a separate post detailing Construct 2's PNG recompression strategies. It's fairly sophisticated and includes automatic color counting to losslessly switch to PNG-8 where possible, giving significant savings for free. People occasionally try to use online services or standalone tools like PNGCrush, but I have tested all the ones I can find and none of them beat the way Construct 2 uses several tools in tandem.

I haven't seen any evidence anyone can beat Construct 2's automatic spritesheeting and PNG recompression with other tools.

I've got to hand it to you... After extensive testing of these claims, I'm pretty sure that what you say is no lie.

Try as I might, I could not manually compress a folder full of sprites as well -and looking as good- as Construct2 could.

The first video game I ever had a hand in creating was in 8bit and we had to cycle pallets for animation effects. No, it wasn't a 'retro game'... That's how long I've been doing this ;)

Thanks for your response, Ashley.