Viewing posts from: July, 2010 »

Image Atlas Packer

Posted by Peter Jones on July 8th, 2010 in Tools

It's that time again! The time where we open our tool box for a little show and tell...and share. This time around, it's an image packer. An "image atlas packer" is a short script that takes numerous small images and places them nicely into one large image. For game development, it saves space, reduces loading times and keeps your image files organized. Our friends over at Wolfire have a wonderful blog post explaining them a bit more thoroughly.

While there are numerous packers that can be found online, our difficulty was in finding any that could handle large numbers of images in multiple directories. Thus, our own atlas packer was born!

As is, our little script will start in the base directory and load all the .PNGs into an atlas. If that atlas is filled, it creates a new one. Then, it will try fitting the rest of the images in all previous atlases before finding a spot in the new one. That way, each atlas is packed as tight as possible. Atlases are named based on the folder that their images are from.

Below, I'll walk you through how to get it working and how to change its settings.
Click "read more" to get started!

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