Greetings,
I am considering going from normal sprites to CCSpritesheet sprites and I had a couple of questions. I did some searching and found little, but I did mess around with Zwoptex and the CCSpritesheet code in the cocos2d tests.
Since I am coming from normal sprites, I have most of my current sprites laid out in tilesets already. The example I saw uses Zwoptex and from what I can see Zwoptex expects to have the tiles in individual files. (Then it does the join and creates plist and a composite tileset).
1) I am assuming I could just create my CCSpriteFrames from my current tileset and add them without doing the plist step (ie: skipping Zwoptex and manually make my CCSpriteSheets from my own frames, like I used to for the normal sprites). Am I correct in this assumption? (I just don't want to accidentally cause CCSprite to process my sprites as normal sprites, thus losing the performance gain, if that's even possible...yep, I'm still a newbie ;-).
2) I do think Zwoptex is a great tool and would prefer to use it for handling my tiles/sprites. I was really hoping Zwoptex could handle splitting up my current tilesets, but if it does, I did not see any indication of it.
Unfortunately the only splitter tool I found for splitting my tileset up seemed to drop the transparency information. Does anyone know of a good tool I can use to split up a tileset?
3) Slightly OT here, but this is confusing me a bit...When using Paintshop Pro to set transparency for my tileset previously, it said it needed to reduce the color count to 256 (8-bit). But I re-read the performance tips and noticed that performance is best when using 4bit or 16bit color-depth tiles. Can I do 16bit with png files or do I need to use another format?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Q