[Newbie terminology] What are Sprites?

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

My question is: What does the term “Sprite” mean? ??? ??? ???

Well, I know roughly what sprites are. They are game graphics. Let me re-phase my question.

Are sprites the sources of the game graphics or the graphic instances created during the game? ???

May be I am not making my question clear. Let’s give an example.

If I have an action game, I have a bullet.jpg file as the graphic source of the bullets. Let’s say I have my game character firing his/her machine gun. Multiple bullets are fired out from the gun, so there are many rendered instances of bullet.jpg on the screen. My question now is: Is the term “Sprite” referring to the image file on the file directory - bullet.jpg(source), or each rendered output(instance) of every bullet fired out during gameplay? ;D

I hope I got my question put up nice and clear. Hope any experienced people will help me out on such simple matter. Thank you in advanced

#2

In my experience ‘sprite’ is somewhat vague and can refer to either. I usually use it to mean an instance of something on the screen though.

#3

Sprite is a class in libgdx library that not only hold the image itself but also coordinates, angle etc.

Sprite is a representation of your enity in game world.

#4

The definition of a sprite is vague.

[quote]Sprite is a representation of your enity in game world.
[/quote]
This is probably the most accurate one. It contains whatever it has to contain to represent a single 2D entity graphically, usually with a single rectangular image. Common things they contain are:

  • a reference to an image
  • a position.
  • a rotation angle
  • a size (width and height). This might be implied by the size of the image, in which case you might not need it, or instead want a single scale variable, or even separate scaleX and scaleY variable.