image archive VS image strip

Posted by DevA on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by DevA
Published on 2008-09-25T08:00:29Z Indexed on 2010/05/31 2:42 UTC
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Hi, i've noticed that plenty of games / applications (very common on mobile builds) pack numerous images into an image strip. I figured that the advantages in this are making the program more tidy (file system - wise) and reducing (un)installation time. During the runtime of the application, the entire image strip is allocated and copied from FS to RAM. On the contrary, images can be stored in an image archive and unpacked during runtime to a number of image structures in RAM.

The way I see it, the image strip approach is less efficient because of worse caching performance and because that even if the optimal rectangle packing algorithm is used, there will be empty spaces between the stored images in the strip, causing a waste of RAM.

What are the advantages in using an image strip over using an image archive file?

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