LibGDX Texture Packer

[Troubleshoots]

So currently I’m learning how to use LibGDX and I’m looking at the texture packer.

[quote]If true, TexturePacker will attempt more efficient packing by rotating images 90 degrees. Applications must take special care to draw these regions properly.
[/quote]
Q1: Why is packing more efficient if the rotate setting is set to true and images are rotated 90 degrees?

Packing a 128x96px tile sheet generates a 128x128px tile sheet.

Q2: Should I limit the max height to 96px, and also how does the PNG file created have a lesser size to that of the original?
EDIT: Fixed the tile sheet size (I set pot to false).

Bonus Q3: Previously in Java2D I loaded tiled maps with a .txt file. Having not used a map editor before, I decided to try out tide. Upon saving a tiled map as a .XML file, I could either choose to use XML encoding or base64 encoding with the option of gzip or zlib compression. With a little research I found that the com.badlogic.gdx.utils.Base64Coder class can be used to decode base64.

So, how much of a difference does it make to use base64 encoding, with or without any compression compared to pure XML?

[davedes]

1 - because rotating images may lead to tighter packing, depending on your sprites.
2 - generally you should stick to power-of-two sizes, such as 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. See here
3 - probably best to stick with XML until other the TideMapLoader officially supports it. The difference is probably not worth your trouble right now – maybe later on you can compress if you find yourself needing it.

[Troubleshoots]

@davedes

1 - because rotating images may lead to tighter packing, depending on your sprites.
2 - generally you should stick to power-of-two sizes, such as 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. See here
3 - probably best to stick with XML until other the TideMapLoader officially supports it. The difference is probably not worth your trouble right now – maybe later on you can compress if you find yourself needing it.

1. Do you mean for example if you had something like this (green is rotated)?

2. Thanks for the link, it’s helpful.

3. I have OCD so I like everything done in the best way possible, but in the future I’ll probably compress it.

[nexsoftware]

For Tiled (.tmx) maps, the libgdx loader can handle csv, base64, base64-gzip or base64-zlib. If you want to target the HTML backend, you will need to use one of the uncompressed formats. For Tide (.tide) maps, only xml is currently supported.