Texture Atlas in reverse?

Okay, I see how that would work. Is it better to do that then say; make the plist file for it (can you)? What tool is best for finding those rect dimensions in either case? Most of my programming experience is doing backend coding, very little graphic experience; so I may be missing the obvious.

Third Party tools like texturePacker generate sprite sheets for Sprite Kit and use a pList file to do so. There are conventions you can follow if you dig deeper into Apple's documentation.

The real question for me would be why are you using a single image instead of a different one for each. What Xcode does for you is generates the single Texture automatically, which is a huge benefit of using Sprite Kit to build an iOS game.

But in the days before Sprite Kit, the artist would lay out images into a sprite sheet and then give the coordinate locations for each. You would then store the fileName (original file name of the single image) in a pList file and you would record in a dict the location, rotation, and trim. Then read out and cut up a texture. I wouldn't recommend doing it this way now.

Xcode will do all of this for you if you use the atlas folder btw.

It wasn't so much 'wanting' to do it that way; it's what I found while googling for (in this case, card images). The ones I found were already in a single pic and was looking for an easy way to access the individual cards. It was for sake of convenience rather than desire.

Did not see the point of breaking up a picture into individual and then recompile into a new atlas. Was looking for a work around.

Your causing yourself more work then necessary, and you are not utilizing the tool you have in Sprite Kit. However I will tell you how I would go about it.

You have the image that you found online. You will need to determine in pixels how big each card is (Usually the artist would tell you this sort of thing, but i am assuming your using open source). Then you can write each card into a plist file with a x and y location and size. Then you can use the method I mentioned earlier.

You could also see how sprite kit breaks down an atlas to be an atlasc file that contains and image and plist, then you should be able to copy what they did and put the file in the right place and it should load on start up.

If you would like to use Sprite Kit and Xcode's atlas system you can use these free assets which have the cards as individual sprites for 3 types of decks: http://www.ironstarmedia.co.uk/2010/01/free-game-assets-08-playing-card-pack/

Thanks for the help. Like I said before, doing graphics is still new to me so this was more a thought exercise on how to do something with limited resources.

Thanks for the link btw, it'll simplify my current project alot. Still need to make jokers for it though ;p