Animations - references, atlases, and performance

[xraven13]

Hi!

I am still undecided should I go with standard Unity animation system. What I like about 2D Toolkit is mobile performance and the ability to quickly test the animations. But since I am porting game from Haxe to Unity, I am trying to find ways to reduce the time of the development. I spent already lot of time on this, but I cannot find clear answers and clear solutions. Hopefully this thread will help me, thank you.

1) What is the performance gain when using 2D Toolkit Sprite Collections compared to standard Unity 5 asset system? What is the performance difference overall for the 2D development for PC, mobile, and consoles? Is there any benchmark comparision available somewhere? Since I make intense 2D top-down shooter games, I have hundreds of rotating/animating enemies and bullets on the screen.

2) From what I understood so far, it is not possible to create Spritesheets from complex atlases generated by the Texture Packer. Though I noticed that the Texture Packer has the 2D Toolkit export. Right now the best practice I found is to use single sprites, which is okay since I can slice them again in Photoshop.

3) Is it possible to set the Collection and the Clip during runtime? If not, is there any way to connect the animations with variables or I need to create prefabs for every animation?

Thanks!

[unikronsoftware]

Hi there,

1. Unsure, I haven't profiled 2D Toolkit vs unity in a long time.

2. Yes that is correct. Single sprites are best, 2D Toolkit will atlas the sprites very efficiently. Its unnecessary in this case to pack in TexturePacker and reimport.

3. Yes it is. You can load the collection at runtime using Resources.Load and play an animation from a the new collection.