louh
commented
10 years ago We do have all the images individually in separate illustrator files right now. They're actually manually concatenated into a single AI file then exported as PNG. But we can easily generate individual PNGs from each illustrator file and let a script handle the workflow of concatenation and finding coordinates (again, something that's manually done by @mwichary).
The files are on Dropbox - send your Dropbox account over e-mail and I'll share the folder with you. I also have a bunch of time this weekend (hooray Memorial Day!) to make PNGs for you to mess with.
I browsed the node-sprite-generator quickly and it looks pretty promising, but I think either this way or Compass has an additional wrinkle because they assume the output for sprite definition is CSS. In Streetmix the sprite definitions are Canvas-based, so the output should be JSON or similar.
Do you think the script should generate tilesheets whenever the server starts, or is it essentially a standalone one (to generate all the tilesheets + data prior to server start, for example, or it can be basically executed on-demand, e.g. if someone updates an asset it can update the static files without having to necessarily restart a server)
drewda
migurski
Rather than pre-baked sprite sheets (https://github.com/codeforamerica/streetmix/blob/master/public/images/tiles-1.png , https://github.com/codeforamerica/streetmix/blob/master/public/images/tiles-2.png , and https://github.com/codeforamerica/streetmix/blob/master/public/images/tiles-3.png ), having the sprite sheets auto-generated from individual PNGs would allow for more flexibility and future expansion.
@louh or @mwichary: Do either of you have the segments as individual images? If so, would you mind sharing those files with me?
Note to self, I'm used to using Compass to do this in the Ruby world. Perhaps worth trying https://github.com/selaux/node-sprite-generator here.