LibGdx TextureAtlas (non .pack file)

Okay, I hit a block when I was starting to think about writing a quick networked multiplayer shoot em up game in LibGdx.

LibGdx texture atlas’s are very handy things because you can store a load of smaller images in one image. This also optimises the GPU draw routines because it doesn’t have to keep swapping textures for each sprite drawn.

I found pre-made free to use sprites from Kenney.nl, below is a section of what they look like:

Unfortunately though, LibGdx uses .pack files for it’s texture atlas’s and this one come with one that looks like this:

<TextureAtlas imagePath="sprites.png">
 <SubTexture name="spaceAstronauts_001.png" x="998" y="847" width="34" height="44"/>
 <SubTexture name="spaceAstronauts_002.png" x="919" y="142" width="37" height="44"/>
 <SubTexture name="spaceAstronauts_003.png" x="824" y="0" width="50" height="44"/>

...
</TextureAtlas>

Which is completely different to a .pack file.

So without further ado I decided to test out an xml parser to retrieve all the sub-regions from the xml file.

Test code as follows:

package com.wlgfx.xml.atlas;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

public class XmlTextureAtlas {
    
	private static final String atlas_src_xml = "/home/wlgfx/Pictures/art-assets/kenny-spaceshooter/Spritesheet/spaceShooter2_spritesheet.xml";
	
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		File xml_file = new File(atlas_src_xml);
		try {
			DocumentBuilderFactory db_factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
			DocumentBuilder d_builder;
			d_builder = db_factory.newDocumentBuilder();
			Document doc = d_builder.parse(xml_file);
			doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
			System.out.println("Root element: " + doc.getDocumentElement().getNodeName());
			
			NodeList list = doc.getElementsByTagName("SubTexture");
			System.out.println(list.getLength());
			
			for (int c = 0; c < list.getLength(); c++) {
				Element elem = (Element)list.item(c);
				String name = elem.getAttribute("name");
				String x = elem.getAttribute("x");
				String y = elem.getAttribute("y");
				String w = elem.getAttribute("width");
				String h = elem.getAttribute("height");
				System.out.println(name+" ("+x+","+y+")("+w+","+h+")");
			}
		} catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (SAXException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
}

So, armed with this now, all thanks mainly to working with GWT, I can quickly move on to creating my own class to generate the texture atlas in LibGdx.