Why sprite sheet ?

Why sprite sheet ?

Many people will face a question that what is sprite sheet?

Sprite sheet is nothing but a collection of small images combined together into one big large size image. These small images can also be called as sprites, hence its called sprite sheet.

Why to use sprite sheet ?

Sprite sheet helps you up with optimization. Which is a very common problem faced by many websites now a days. So it helps you with loading the site quicker.

Consider below example:

If your website contains 40 images, now to call all those images now to fetch those images 40 times the request will get sent from client to server, therefore processing time increases.
But if I load all those 40 images in one sheet and arrange them in a sequence as i wish them to appear on my website pages. In this case what is going to happen client is going to request server for all 40 images one time, and as needed they can be displayed on the website.
Ultimately my processing time got reduce, result is faster running website and happy customers and more traffic on the site.
and cherry on top of this is that you can compress the size of your sprite sheet, and voila more smaller the size of sprite sheet processing time faster. And using CSS you can display any little segment from that file(sprite sheet) as a background to an element.
Combining your images into a single file will not only significantly lower the number of HTTP Requests, but will also decrease the total file size of the images.
You can compile all the images manually or you can use different tools to combine. Many of these tools are free and some of them are paid.

Tools
    TexturePacker
    SpriteMe
    Compass
Editing and redesigning of sprites

There are many tools are available in the market with the help of which you can redesign the sprites. You can change the sequence the way those sprite appears, also you can merge them back !! Bonus
This is where our tool comes into a picture Sprite sheet Plist Editor for Texture Packer and BuildBox.

This app is a every Game Developer/ Designer’s most handy tool. If you need to re-design a new game purchased from Envato Market or any other market. Then this tool can save your money spent on the projects on such market. This is awesome application made in Java and runnable on any OS which supports Java Run Time Environment.
– Get all the Sprites present in the Sprite Sheet.
– Now easily extract every Sprite from a Plist file.
– Fast and Easy and pixel perfect result.
– Merge Back all the Sprites after editing on the exact same position so that the Sprite sheet stays the way it is meant to be.
– Compatible with Texture Packer Plist files.
– Edit the Plist Sprite Sheet without its main project file.
– Preview all the Sprites present in the Plist file.