I was wondering what would be the most efficient/best practice way to add sprites in a text. From my understanding, we have two possibilities :
Manually add them in the same Sprite, with the Sprite Mode set to Multiple, then we create one unique TMP Sprite Asset.
Create one Sprite per image, and add them to a Sprite Atlas. But we will need to have one TMP Sprite Asset per Sprite.
While the first choice appears to take more time, I don’t know if the second one is still optimized correctly with having one Sprite Atlas (because we still have multiple TMP Sprite Asset).
From a rendering point of view, packing all the sprites in the same texture is more efficient given these all share the same material / texture and thus results in 1 draw call.
Having individual sprites in separate textures results in 1 draw call per material / texture used.
From a workflow point of view, it is easier to edit / manage individual sprites / textures than a combines sprite sheet / texture atlas.
P.S. I did experiment with supporting the Sprite Atlas system in Unity. There are current limitation and API functionality that is missing for this to happen but I would like to support this as it would enable users to keep these sprites as individual textures but have the benefits of having the Sprite Atlas system combine them into a single texture.