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I've noticed sprite sheets are used more and more in Flash games and I don't fully understand what are the advantages over an image sequence/flash timeline - MovieClip.

I've read this related question: 2D graphics - why use spritesheets? and that makes sense for hardware accelerated games, but that's not the case for flash yet.

Any Flash Player specific insights ?

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George Profenza
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  • I don't know if there's any real technical advantage, but if I were to start making a flash game, I'd probably go with a sprite sheet because I'm more familiar with that approach than flash timelines.. – Jari Komppa Jan 18 '11 at 12:24
  • Just because Flash is not hardware accelerated yet does not mean that it isnt processing things in the same way... Remember that graphics can be done on a CPU, the GPU was just made specifically to do it (And alot of other things as of late, hehe) – James Jan 19 '11 at 00:56

2 Answers2

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Some popular flash game engines (eg. flixel) use sprite-sheets for sprite-animations. This is mainly because they also implemented a bitmap-based rendering engine which doesn't use the native flash display-classes like "Sprite", "MovieClip" for each object but rather a big bitmap-image where stuff is drawn onto using pixel-operations. Using a bitmap-based approach (i.e. Spritesheet) for a bitmap-based rendering engine is the most efficient thing to do.

This question covers some of the different rendering-methods.

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bummzack
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Don't think there is a huge advantage to using one or the other, but it makes porting your game/graphics a lot easier, as any platform can use spritesheets. If you are doing a strict flash game, probably comes down to preference/quickness.

Spooks
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