Official Sprite Atlas v2 in Unity 2022.1 beta

Great, I'm glad you're still working on improving sprite atlas which is a fundamental core aspect of 2D performance. I've already posted elsewhere (https://forum.unity.com/threads/2d-system-optimizations.805905/). To reiterate, sprite atlas is one of those core "performance by default" things that isn't sexy, but really helps all Unity games that utilize this feature. The atlas being a generated asset is a great thing about V2. However, it's still missing the efficiency of modern packers (spine, atlas maker) and I want it to be better.
A) Generate the best/efficient tight mesh
B) Better analyze all meshes and generate more efficient packing.

 

Backporting this to 2020?

Also, something that's really needed is being able to access an atlas by sprite path in addressables.
I have lots of sprites whose addresses are stored in configuration files for my custom made levels and thus I load them at runtime, but I have no way of knowing in which sprite atlas each sprite is. I'm currently investigating into creating a custom sprite atlas importer that creates a .bytes file that contains the paths of all sprites, but it feels like 'reinventing the wheel'.

In other words, I want to call Addressables.LoadAsync<Sprite>("Assets/Res/2D/Characters/Monsters/Monster1/IdleAnimation/frame1.png") and get the sprite, optionally getting SpriteAtlasManager.atlasRequested fired the first time any sprite from this atlas is requested, where I also choose waht variant of the sprite atlas to load: LD, SD or HD.

 

@rustum we are trying to use sprite atlas for a big mobile game mainly to pack lots of ui sprites. The main issue I have with is algorithm for creating tight meshes is not as effective as it could be.
Before we were using "https://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker"
and as you can see their implementation is much more efficient. Is this something that is being worked on? We really like the new flow where unity automatically generates atlases and this is hidden from a user's perspective but issues like this are blockers when you need to squeeze hundreds or even thousands of sprites of different shapes and sizes into the atlases efficiently so you can minimize app size and memory runtime usage.

The second issue is I noticed the packing of textures into atlas is also not as efficient and even if you have allow rotation enabled it often won't rotate, but if I rotate it manually in photoshop it will manage to squeeze it in atlas without doubling one dimension.

Also, is there a way to set outline tolerance and generate the outline when sprite is imported to avoid doing it manually on hundreds of assets?

If you need any more info on this I'm more then willing to help since I would really like us to use sprite atlas instead of third party tools mainly because of faster and easier workflow.

 

Just use SpriteUV https://www.spriteuv.com/ I don’t think Unity are capable of making improvements to their sprite tools or they would have.

 

For cases like this it would be really cool if we could get access to source, fix it ourselves and do a pull request.

 

@rustum Like @AcidArrow linked this is now another third party app which has better mesh generation then unity, why does it seem to be such a problem to improve this?

 

Another problem is that Unity doesn’t have a way to allow rotation of sprites in an imported texture atlas so external programs can’t fix all of Unity’s problems here (not entirely). Unity if you’re not able to update your meshing/atlas solution please let us use external tools that will do this work! Also while I’m wishing into the void for atlas improvement also let us set the texture to use mipmap streaming!

 

@rustum any news on this?

 

How do you preview the sprite atlas v2 atlas in editor?

 

Check this (2nd part about the "Pack Preview"):
https://forum.unity.com/threads/spr...ight-mobile-performance.1295937/#post-8224419

 

I meant to preview it in editor on the UI or wherever it is used

 

You don't have to do anything once you packed it in the atlas. You just use sprite like normal one on your UI element and Unity will take care that it's from the atlas. If you didn't mean that, then explain better what you want?

 

I mean to see the sprite sheet in use in editor in the Game view rather than just in the build, unless I'm confusing myself and it is already showing in the Game view.

 

You're confusing everybody I think

Again, as I linked in the 1st reply to you, there is a way to see an Atlas in the Editor, not in the Game View but in a separate Window Unity will show. Just follow the instructions from that post's 2nd part.

Btw, didn't you maybe mean to click on some UI sprite and see to which Atlas it belongs? Not sure, but I think that info is not directly exposed to you...

 

Once the sprites are in the atlas, I want to see the actual atlased textures in use in the game view wherever the sprites are used. E.g. if I have a few round UI buttons set to 'Tight' packing, when they are used in the UI and another sprite overlaps too much into one of them in the atlas when tightly packed, if I can catch that in the game view and adjust the packing of that round button sprite to 'full rect' so that nothing overlaps the transparent space around it.

To be completely clear because you keep replying to me about the wrong thing, I know how to see the sprite atlas preview on the atlas. I care more about seeing how the packed sprites behave in the actual game in the editor. When using v1 sprite atlas packer, you used to have the option to only use the sprite atlas sprites in the build or the editor but now that option is gone.