hi again. i''ve been thinking about making a Sprite-Lib (to be OpenSource) and would like your thoughts / help: would a single bitmap with multiple textures or a zip with multiple bitmaps (.bmp) be better? if your intterrested in helping me build it (I''m not THAT good) your welcome to do so. (or do it all yourself!:-)) cu!

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Original post by Frank Henry

would a single bitmap with multiple textures or
a zip with multiple bitmaps (.bmp)
be better?

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I''d do both. One saves space, the other requires less state changes. My entire engine is based off of a package format (using ZLib). All model loading and texture loading is meant to extract the information from already loaded data because of this (instead of file).


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yes, cool idea.
you could make the sprite library in such away that users can save packages of sprites to a resource file (in which case they would be compressed), which they can distribute on the net--to be loaded into the application.

Is the application going to run as a sprite server..for the game engines. In otherwords, will you have api calls to the library to import the .bmps? (in this case, for speed they will not be zipped)

hmm.. unfortunetly i have no idea of resource files.
(one of the reasons i''m looking for help!)
basicly i''m looking for something easy to do an use.
any ideas?

Goto http://www.gzip.org/zlib. It''s free, open source library that handles compression and decompression (see the compress and decompress functions in the manual, they''re all you need). Then, just make your own zip utility that accepts a list of files to compress from a text file on the command line. Now, write one to decompress them all, then just reuse that code (which is easy if it was organized the first time).

[Resist Windows XP''s Invasive Production Activation Technology!]

thanks
i''ll check it out and post my results!
i''f every(any)thing works i''d love to make it os!