Good day community,

I'm looking for some help, I'm currently developing a 2D game using OpenGL ES 2.0 and the default Android SDK, targeting games above Android 2.2.

Let's say that I have 100 items.
Each one of those items might have a preview texture inside an atlas.

Maybe 10 item preview per a big atlas to optimize.
But once the item is equipped, I need an independant texture per item.

The thing is that I load the entire textures when the game starts, usinh quite a lot of memory.

Is this a good aproach?
Should I rather load the required textures to OpenGL when the user equips the tem?
Thanks in advance

You should load the textures as the games starts, which will take a little bit more load time and memory, but will save memoiry and load time in game

If I read this right, you are putting these items together as a single image or a handful of images either in the atlas or externally? In this instance, I honestly would just use sprite sheets. Have one sheet for the default item, and one sheet for the item with the preview or what have you.


If you just have too many items and textures, and using the atlas and condensing them won't work and you're still running into slow load times and rough memory management, consider only loading a handful at a time and just dynamically loading/unloading.