Hello Everyone,
I am not an artist... I use OpenGameArt to find assets to use in projects. It is fantastic, I appreciate all the work everyone puts into creating this gigantic collection of assets.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a "Universal Texture Atlas" format? Like, a general purpose JsonFile that describes the content of a given texture?
Take entries like:
https://opengameart.org/content/tiny-16-basic, or https://opengameart.org/content/700-rpg-icons, or https://opengameart.org/content/space-ship-construction-kit
In each of these there are some pretty good Graphics tucked away inside large spritesheets... the download here is a great start, but it still requires that everyone that downloads the file spend a lot of time searching for the various bounding boxes. Some textures are well defined grids, others are haphazard collections of images..
For some images like various terrain sprite sets it is sometimes difficult to tell where one sprite is meant to end and the next to begin. Also for various sprites that are meant to be individual parts of a composite image it can be difficult to understand why some images were included (as in, what part of the thing they are supposed to represent).
Would there be any interest in using an application that would help generate .Json Sprite Atlases? I think, if we created a well defined protocol we could design a universal sprite atlas. Using a format like .Json would keep the atlas agnostic to the application consuming it. Users of the site that don't want to mess with sprite atlasts can use the file as a manual bounding box look up (and it would allow people to talk about specific sprites with a spritesheet by a common name instead of... "that red looking chair near the third row of doors"). So the existence of the file would be beneficial at even the most basic usage level.
Realisticly... the minimum effort required to be put into a texture atlas would be a JsonFile with an element per sprite describing it's location within the texture. But we could allow complex texture atlasing as well, such as allowing a single texture atlas to reference multiple texture files and sprite groupings.
My one question is... if User A uploads some textures... would it be possible for user B to download those textures, create the sprite atlas then upload the atlas to page they originally downloaded it from... that would likely be the best solution... that way... an artist could create images however they want (as they currently do) and someone else would be able to create the spriteatlas for them if the artist didn't want to be bothered with it.
Additionally, we could easily include Credit information in the sprite atlas... Each Sprite or Sprite group could have an optional member describing the chain of artists that created the work and all that information.