The current game i'm working on has alot of assets (2 full 1024x1024 sheets), and there are more assets being created.
This is due to a high number of quality animations, across a rather large variation of enemy's and player usable sprites, + HUD, backgrounds etc.
My question, is how viable is it to selectively load lots of miniature spritesheets.
E.g. Having as many spritesheets as I have enemys..
enemy01.plist, enemy02.plist etc etc
Each of these may only be 128px by 256px, I understand that every pixel of the spritesheet is loaded into memory regardless of if it is filled or not (transparent space), so I will have to be very savy loading these sheets in.
My thinking is that if i only load the sheets required for the enemys that will appear on that level, it would save memory and solve my problem.
I am posting to find out if anyone has done anything like this before, or if they would recommend me a different solution to my problem.
I understand the limit as to how much sheet space can be loaded at once is about 2 1024x1024 sheets on an iphone 3g before you start suffering from fps lag.
I think the trickiest part will be ensuring that my enemy's are added to the correct spritesheet when they are created, other than that I can't see any blindly obvious downsides, other than man hours.
