Using sprite sheets in Cocos2d-x

A sprite sheet is a way to group multiple images together in one image file. In order to texture a sprite with one of these images, you must have the information of where in the sprite sheet that particular image is found (its rectangle).

Sprite sheets are often organized in two files: the image one and a data file that describes where in the image you can find the individual textures.

I used TexturePacker to create these files for the game. You can find them inside the ipad, ipadhd, and iphone folders inside Resources. There is a sprite_sheet.png file for the image and a sprite_sheet.plist file that describes the individual frames inside the image.

This is what the sprite_sheet.png file looks like:

Batch drawing sprites

In Cocos2d-x, sprite sheets can be used in conjunction with a specialized node, called SpriteBatchNode. This node can be used whenever you wish to use multiple sprites that share the same source image inside the same node. So you could have multiple...