@pspeed, thanks for the reply. I actually tried to use TextureAtlas before I post my question. In Libgdx, I can have a ‘sprite sheet’ and use TextureRegion to designate the different tiles as separate textures. It is conceptually very simple. TexturePacker is easy to use. For nice tile maps, it is straight forward to manually create the ‘atlas’ by using a notepad (that is actually how I create).
Unfortunately the scene graph support of Libgdx is weak. I decided to convert my games to JMonkey. I am less familiar with JMonkey; it seems JMonkey’s TextureAtlas is a different concept, am I right?
I am currently working on a 2D game. I will add 3D feature after I port the game. If I already have a sprite sheet. Do I have to cut the tiles and save them as individual images on my hard drive before loading them back to JMonkey as different textures? It is much easier for me to edit the sprites if they are all on one single sheet; thus I don’t want to cut them up.
I am thinking the second possibilities is to load the sprite image as one BufferedImage and draw the individual tiles on smaller BufferedImage and convert them to Texture. This seems straight forward, does JMonkey has built-in functions such as loadBufferedImage() and bufferedImageToTexture()?
Can TextureAtlas be used to avoid all these mess? If so, can you give me a hint how to do it. Thanks