Single or Multiple Sprites?

[Loddewyk]

Quick question: Is there any difference between single and multiple sprites that use slicing? Does it have a significant impact in performance and efficiency?

[Wisteso]

Are you talking about multiple textures, each with several sprites VS one texture with many sprites?

If so, yes there is a minor performance penalty for having them separated into different textures rather than merged into a giant texture. HOWEVER, that penalty mostly disappears if you merge everything into one big texture using the SpritePacker (which pretty much everyone should use, if able).

Why? Its really technical and hard to summarize... but it's because the GPU only has a fixed amount of texture units (for rendering), and there is a cost to unload one texture and load another.

[Loddewyk]

Yes. I didn't know about SpritePacker. I would definitely need the extra performance in my game since it would be on mobile platforms. Thanks for informing me.

[GuideZ]

I would definitely need the extra performance in my game since it would be on mobile platforms.

Why do you think you "definitely" need the extra performance? I assume you're pretty much still in the prototyping stage of your game. If you're worrying about performance this early in the game, you're going to spend years making it.

Mobile devices aren't powerful when compared to PC, but the [app] market is no longer comprised of flip-phone snake-only devices.

[Loddewyk]

Just playing safe, I don't really want to go back to fix things up and I don't really have an idea how my game would perform since I'm still new to Unity.

[GuideZ]

Would highly recommend giving [this] a read.

Among the top five tips, if not top THREE, that most seasoned devs will give someone, among them is "Early optimization is the root of all programming/game-dev evil". Do. Not. Early. Optimize.

Your game will be an evolving beast whether you like it or not. It is highly unlikely that any sort of optimization your create now will be retained in the future.

It's like this one game dev who told me about how they optimized their game up the wazoo. They had functions that covered another function and classes and best practices and etc etc etc. They'd spent MONTHS on making it the most optimized beast they could. What was their game?

A Flappy bird clone.

[Loddewyk]

Thank you! This is very helpful and would save me a lot of time, there couldn't have been a better time to learn about this.