Sorry, it’s been a long time. There will be a lot of emotions.
Guys, I’ve been in IT for 15 years. Mostly desktop programming, some multithreading.
Also about 5 years in web - HTML/CSS/SCSS/Gulp/ PHP / Symphony . OOP, paradigms, GOF/DRY/KISS…etc.
First - dear developers - what about the documentation?
For 15 years I have read tons of documentation and yours is one of the worst. Zero examples, zero best practices. Poor localization (2025-age of neural networks).
Half of the article is in Russian, half in English. What kind of attitude to work?
Open the Symphony framework documentation and see how it is written. This is a good example.
No good documentation, no good examples - it is not clear how to work.
You think I’m the only one? Look what’s on YouTube - 90% of Unity videos contain terrible code. I am a member of many communities, in telegram chats - everywhere there is misunderstanding and invention, homemade solutions.
I came from web development - there is no such thing even close, because there is documentation. Normal, good documentation.
Now to sprite atlases.
I spent about 2 weeks. And I, who can learn the framework in 1 month, don’t know how to work with your atlases. I don’t know how the hell Unity works with them!
You write 1 atlas per scene. Are you serious? Those are your words - ideally 1 atlas and that’s it. And in the non-ideal case? It’s a mystery!
Let’s go to the gpt chat. It says 1-3 atlas per scene. All right, let’s believe him… you don’t have documentation.
Minimize the load on the video system, rendering, switching. To do this, we create each scene its own atlas. Isn’t that perfect?
Each scene has its own folder for images.
We put all prefabs and images in this folder.
Add the folder to the atlas.
We’re I.T. guys, it’s cool! 1 scene, 1 atlas, 1 folder. Perfect?
\Assets\Scenes\Scene1\Img1\1.png This Img1 folder add in Atlas1
\Assets\Scenes\Scene2\Img1\1.png This Img1 folder add in Atlas2
Start unity…and… atlas 2 are loaded! How?
And unity decided that on its own!
Images in different folders. Each folder has a different set to minimize the atlas. And yes some of them can overlap and that’s normal.
What is Unity doing? Loads a random atlas!
Tell me, where in IT , system product is this behavior?
Nowhere.
I in Windows 2 times click on a file, and I will open a copy of it, if it is somewhere on the disk? What?
I will access /home/somefile.php in php and I will execute /home/www/somefile.php if it is there? What?
What about atlases? Why is there no documentation, where are the examples?
Why does working with atlases violate the reuse paradigm, why does the behavior of atlases include elements of randomness - who designs systems this way?
Atlases are related to rendering optimization.
It should have nothing to do with file names, sizes, signatures. I clearly specify the files, their number and atlas.
Unity itself loads that, atlas, with a different image. It is different - its location in the file system is different. It is not for this atlas, it is not included in it.