Continuing with my extensions to Apple's Texture2D
class, this post is about extending the sprite sheet functionality in part 2 to render sprites of arbitrary size indexed by an atlas. This is more flexible than having all sprites of the same dimension, laid out uniformly in a large texture image. You can even have overlapping sprites and do other funky things as you're in full control over exactly which part of the texture to render.
For example, the following texture atlas is an extension of the sprite sheet used in part 2 and contains sprites of different sizes laid out in no particular way in the image: