Texture and animation in iOS

Question

I am developing a game for iPhone retina enabled.

This game has alot of sprite sheets to be used. MyQuestion which is better to use

1. pvr
2. pvr.gz
3. pvr.ccz
4. or normal png format

which is the best practice for using sprite sheets.

Answer 1

Counter-Question: Is it better to use a sports car or a pickup truck?

It depends on your particular use case. You'll use PNG if you can't afford any loss in quality. You'll use PVR if memory and rendering speed are of higher concern.

GZ and CCZ are simply compression algorithms that determine how well the data is packed and how fast it can be loaded. I hear that PVR.CZZ is the fastest to load.

Now, what made me curious is that you say you have "a lot of sprite sheets". Ideally you'll want to be using as few as possible (best: 1) sprite sheets in a scene. If you create a sprite sheet per game object you're approaching it the wrong way, sprite sheets (texture atlases) are not a tool to structure and categorize your image assets! Your goal should be to cram as many images as possible into a single sprite sheet (texture atlas) to improve rendering performance.

In some cases you'll even want to duplicate some of your images so that you can create a single texture atlas for the current scene (level) even if that means to duplicate some images in the other scenes.