08-28-2015, 04:20 PM
this probably wasn't to prevent sprites from being ripped...
now, if i were to guess...these sprites were rendered from vector graphics...
most vector-based sprites have thousands of pieces, and can be many times more complex than their bitmap predecessors
to conserve on filesize and texture memory, the animation data is exported, and the individual pieces are rendered to a sheet, instead of rendering the hundreds, or thousands of frames, that the original sprite is comprised of.
Look-up something called Dragon Bones, it's a flash animation framework that does exactly this.
Also, I plan on uploading some rips from a little game called age of war 2... I exported one of these directly, and there's over 220 frames in just that one sprite. The resulting sheet, that I used Daxar's Sprite Sheet Maker to create, is nearly 10,000 pixels wide! vector animations weren't really intended to be rasterized. So, the solution that some devs came up with is to rasterize their parts, and animate them in a similar manner as they would've been if left in their native format. The side effect is that it isn't user-friendly, and hours, days, weeks, maybe months, maybe years of work would be required to re-assemble the sprites manually!
All that said, this method of saving complex sprites as part sheets, is an optimization technique. If they wanted the sprites to be un-rip-able, there'd be a layer of encryption as well... (and even that doesn't guarantee anything, with some of the hackers these asset-ripping sites have)
now, if i were to guess...these sprites were rendered from vector graphics...
most vector-based sprites have thousands of pieces, and can be many times more complex than their bitmap predecessors
to conserve on filesize and texture memory, the animation data is exported, and the individual pieces are rendered to a sheet, instead of rendering the hundreds, or thousands of frames, that the original sprite is comprised of.
Look-up something called Dragon Bones, it's a flash animation framework that does exactly this.
Also, I plan on uploading some rips from a little game called age of war 2... I exported one of these directly, and there's over 220 frames in just that one sprite. The resulting sheet, that I used Daxar's Sprite Sheet Maker to create, is nearly 10,000 pixels wide! vector animations weren't really intended to be rasterized. So, the solution that some devs came up with is to rasterize their parts, and animate them in a similar manner as they would've been if left in their native format. The side effect is that it isn't user-friendly, and hours, days, weeks, maybe months, maybe years of work would be required to re-assemble the sprites manually!
All that said, this method of saving complex sprites as part sheets, is an optimization technique. If they wanted the sprites to be un-rip-able, there'd be a layer of encryption as well... (and even that doesn't guarantee anything, with some of the hackers these asset-ripping sites have)