Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
cifying the area within the image that the pixel copying is to take place, we can simply
use one master image from which all of our graphics assets can be drawn.
Instead of sending multiple loose images from the server down to the client, we can
simply bundle all of our images into a single atlas file then draw each asset from a
certain section of this larger collage.
Following is an image atlas with many smaller images inside it placed side by side,
allowing us to retrieve each individual image from a single image asset. One of the
main benefits of this technique is that we only need one HTTP request to the server
in order to gain access to all of the images used within the atlas.
Of course, the challenge in using this technique is that we would need a way to know
where each particular image is located within the atlas file. While doing this by hand
might not seem too cumbersome on a small project such as this one, the complexity
of this task gets unruly very fast.
There exist many open source tools available to solve this very problem. These tools
take individual loose image files, bundle them up in the smallest possible atlas that
can be generated from the list of images provided, and also generate a JSON file
