I posted a question on StackExchange. Anyone care to “put together” informations about performance of displaying Sprites? Is it just a simple story, that Tilesheet is the best option?
Most likely, yes. I recently ported my bitmapdata based framework to use Tilesheet instead. The difference on native is huge. The drawback is that in flash (or any other non hardware accelerated target) you’ll get graphical artefacts and some things plain doesn’t work (I’m looking at you alpha!). So depending on what you’re aiming for you might want to look at different options.
Is this recommended for simply loading flat graphical assets such as background and character portraits? My assumption was that the tilesheet class was only for actual animations, but there may be some other implicit benefit I am unaware of.
If I understand it correctly, every time you want to draw an image you have to send it to the graphics card. This takes time. Hence it’s an obvious improvement if you limit these types of calls per frame my putting as much graphics as possible into single images and sending them together with coordinates of what to draw where (i.e. drawTiles).
If you only have a single/few static items on screen the improvement may be tiny, but my experience tells me that the complexity of peoples games tend to grow and you might as well go the full mile straight away. 