Need help understanding Sprite & Texture
cocos2d-iphone, sprite, textures
Solution
A texture is an in-memory image that the device can draw onto the screen.
A sprite actually draws the texture, or just a specific rectangle of the texture, on the screen. The sprite can be scaled, rotated, positioned, skewed, tinted (colorized) among other things.
Multiple sprites can share the same texture. The texture is only loaded to memory once regardless of how many sprites are using the same texture. Moreover with CCSpriteBatchNode you can "batch" the drawing of all sprites that are using the same texture to achieve better performance.
A bitmap is a general term for a computer image where each pixel is represented by one or more bits. There's also the image format BMP which is/was popular on Windows. Most people would just say "image" these days as there are other forms of "bitmaps" that are not images. For example in AI code you often have bitmaps (arrays of bits) that represent state information of the AI or pathfinding algorithms for all areas of the game world. Ie each area in the world could have a "blocking" bit, or a "resource" bit that helps the AI making decisions.
See also Wikipedia:
- Texture Mapping
- Bitmap
Problem
I recently started looking at cocos2d game development. What's the difference between sprite and texture? Maybe I could through in 'bitmap' in there. What is a bitmap? They all seem to be the same thing as 2d image.