Hi!
In my opinion, importing sprite strips is a pretty basic thing in game engines, but in Defold the only option I found is through tilesource tiles or do tedious work and slice sprites yourself beforehand to import to the atlas. It seems tilesource can work only with one image file meaning either there will be tilesource for each sprite strip (idle, run, jump, etc) being totally opposite why atlas exists or to make one big image with all animations in and hope they are in the right order for tilesource to create separate animations.
Am I missing something?
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No you are not missing something.
Sprite strips are a single column/row atlas, if you want to use them as is you would have to do as you say with tilesources, but as you mention - they won’t batch and are simply quite inefficient. This is normally not a problem as you would have control of how you export the graphics, but I assume this are assets you have gotten from some kind of package.
I don’t think you can avoid splitting your sprite strips into single images, if you have a lot of them then maybe it would be worth looking into a script for your image editor that can split the images for you. You can probably also do this with ImageMagick.
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Ordering doesn’t matter if the sprites are in the same atlas it will just be one draw call. The engine will batch everything.
@ianshk Right order was referred to creating all sprites in one file to use the tilesource to have all in one “atlas”.
Yes, using ImageMagick makes it a breeze:
convert image.png -crop 32x32 part-%02d.png
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@britzl It’s probably breeze for you, since you know WHERE to type that command line. For me It’s not the case.
I used Aseprite and imported each file separately to export individual image.
Yes, you need to be comfortable working from the command line. I think Asesprite can split images automatically as well.