Cocos2D and sprites - separate images or spritesheet?

[lootcorp]

Hi all -

I'm messing around with Cocos2D on a proof of concept, and I have a question about sprite performance.

I will be creating a number of sprites to represent game pieces on the gameboard. They are similar to Scrabble tiles, where each tile looks identical except for the letter on the front.

I'm trying to think of the best way to accomplish this - I have thought of three options so far:

1. Create a separate PNG file and sprite for each gamepiece
2. Create a spritesheet containing all possible gamepieces, and load them from the spritesheet
3. Create a blank gamepiece PNG and attach a label of some kind as a child to the sprite to display the gamepiece's value


Which would you recommend? What is the performance hit of #1 vs #2? I expect to have anywhere between 8 and 24 gamepieces displayed on screen at any given time.

#3 is the least work intensive for me, but I worry that I might have limited formatting options with the label and may not be able to get the gamepieces to look correctly (nicely rendered gamepiece with a cheesy-looking text label slapped on top)

Thanks,

Jim

[AndreaT]

I think a good choice is to make a separate spritesheet for each layer... ex. HUD,gamesprite...

If i can remember well you can assign a different Z only if the sprites are in different CCSpriteSheet...

I also can suggest to search zwoptex on google and read some tutorial about this app.

[lootcorp]

Originally Posted by AndreaT

I think a good choice is to make a separate spritesheet for each layer... ex. HUD,gamesprite...

If i can remember well you can assign a different Z only if the sprites are in different CCSpriteSheet...

I also can suggest to search zwoptex on google and read some tutorial about this app.

Thanks, it seems sprite sheets are the way to go here. I'm checking out both Zwoptex and TexturePacker - Ray Wenderlich's site has some great tutorials on using both.

How To Use Animations and Sprite Sheets in Cocos2D | Ray Wenderlich

How to Create and Optimize Sprite Sheets in Cocos2D with Texture Packer and Pixel Formats | Ray Wenderlich

[mochibits]

I purchased Zwoptex based on some reviews, and I can say that it is easy to use, and works seamlessly with Cocos2d.

I also dont think it has to be a different spritesheet. I am able to assign different Z's with everything on one spritesheet.

[bweberapps]

You definitely want to use as few spritesheets as possible. This will greatly improve memory usage and performance. Textures on the iPhone can only be loaded with their width and height having to be a power of two, so 2, 4, 8, 16 up to 1024 on older devices and 2048 on newer devices. This means if you have a texture at 66x66 it will have to load a 128x128 texture to fit it in, which almost quadruples the memory usage. So make your spritesheets in powers of two, like 512x1024 and put as many sprites as you can on it. Also put sprites that will be used in the same scenes on the same sheets, you don't want to have to load a second 1024x1024 spritesheet just to use one sprite image from it.