Android Question libGDX and Texture Atlas Overhead

Your question is not clear. You cannot pass an atlas to an actor (you pass a region, a sprite or a drawable to a Scn2DImage, which can be created from an atlas) and you cannot create "animation textures" (you could do it from a pixmap, but I'm not sure that is what you want to do).

Here are a few informations about textures and atlas:
All regions, sprites or drawables created from a texture do not use extra memory (except to store their class properties) so you can create as many regions, sprites or drawables as you want. Only the number of textures really matters as it has two consequences:
- each texture takes a significant part of native memory (width * height * 4 bytes);
- displaying too many textures implies to switch them repeatedly in the texture unit of the GPU, which hinders performance.
For the latter reason, a texture atlas is interesting because you group on the same texture many different images. The usual way to use an atlas is to load assets in the background (as I do in the demo) when the game is launched (most splash screens in games are just there to make you wait while the resources are loading) and call FindRegion when you need a region of this atlas or Create9Path, CreateSprite, CreateRegionDrawable for the other types.
Calling these functions may be expensive as they browse the list of images stored in the atlas and create a new class to use the found region. It is more efficient to call them once and store the created region (or sprite or drawable...) in a global variable.

I'm new to this (If you couldn't tell ) so I apologize if my terminology was confusing or inexact. However, I think you still managed to answer my question so thank you!

Given the example: You have created an actor class that will need to be on the stage in 20 different places (20 instances of the actor class)

Based on your response, I think you are saying that it would be better to create all of the lgTextureAtlasRegion variables you will need for your actor classes animations, once, as global variables and then pass them to the various actors classes you need during initialization and have each actor class instance create its own lgAnimation variables.

... as opposed to ....

Passing your lgTextureAtlas to your actor class and having each class instance create its own lgTextureAtlasRegion and lgAnimation variables.


If I still have not managed to grasp the concept, please let me know.

Thanks again,

Richard

Jeffrey Cameron said:

I'm new to this (If you couldn't tell ) so I apologize if my terminology was confusing or inexact.

Click to expand...

I just did the same thing. I didn't notice that I wrote "create a new class to use" instead of "create a new instance for"...

Jeffrey Cameron said:

Given the example: You have created an actor class that will need to be on the stage in 20 different places (20 instances of the actor class)

Based on your response, I think you are saying that it would be better to create all of the lgTextureAtlasRegion variables you will need for your actor classes animations, once, as global variables and then pass them to the various actors classes you need during initialization and have each actor class instance create its own lgAnimation variables.

... as opposed to ....

Passing your lgTextureAtlas to your actor class and having each class instance create its own lgTextureAtlasRegion and lgAnimation variables.

Click to expand...

lgAnimation is meant to be initialized with an array of regions created by the FindRegions method (note the S at the end) of lgTextureAtlas. If all animations use the same regions, it is better to call FindRegions only once, assign its result to a variable and use only the variable thereafter for each animation initialization. But if you have different regions to animate different actors, there's no preference (being given that everything is initialized in the Create event).