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Hi,

I've split my character (for a platform game intended for PC/Mac) down into separate sprites for the legs and body. I've probably gone a little overboard so I've ended up with a fairly large sprite set for the legs (running and walking on flat, shallow up, steep up, shallow down and steep down, crouching, standing etc). They won't fit onto a single 1024 x 1024 image and I've heard the following...

1. Images should be no larger than 1024 x 1024
2. Performance is best when sprites are made up from a single image (as frame changes are really just UV offsets) rather than adding frames to a sprite from multiple images.

So I have some choices as detailed below but not sure which is true/best...

A. Make the image that holds the sprite frames (legs) larger, for example 2048 x 2048 because the game is intended for PC/Mac rather than mobile and PC/Macs are fine with larger images.

B. Do have separate images because the performance hit is very small (or is it?) and larger images are a bad idea full stop.

C. Use different sprites (that are made from single images) and swap them out so I don't use images larger than 1024 AND I also don't use sprites that obtain their frames from multiple images.

So...which option out of A, B or C is best? Any insight appreciated!

A. probably unless you have any plans to add mobile support at some point as they just wont load on mobile if too large.

doubt any of those methods will cause much hassle on pc though anyway, just go with whatever you are comfortable with.

Since you're targeting PC/Mac you should be OK with at least 2048^2, but I've not tested higher. On desktop large texture files don't hurt performance much. Lots of texture files can take a bit in loading time, but again on desktop not much.
No clue if #2 is true. I was running some tests a while back and added 4 1024x1024 textures together with each having 64 frames for a total of 256 frames. I could not notice any issues. Performance is probably better when using a single texture, but "better" may be the difference between 10 ms over 300 frames. Hard to tell without testing on multiple machines.
Like smallg says, probably no difference on PC/Mac to worry about it. Maybe if you have 5,000 sprites on screen at once and you want over 60FPS, but IMO anything over 60FPS is pointless

Cheers guys. I'll use bigger images as it's the easiest solution! 😃