Asphyre Sphinx access pattern

[SilverWarior]

Sprite sheets in the context of hardware accelerated graphics are essentially a form of texture atlas. As Silverwarrior suggested, packing your images into atlases (as I assume packing into an ASDb does) will greatly improve loading and rendering times as multiple sprites/frames can be loaded in a single image (meaning that you animate texture co-ordinates across an image for each frame rather than selecting a new image)

As far as I know Asphyre Sphix texture manager already stores its textures in one or multiple atlasses. And that is basically what is causing major slowdowns when loading individual textures as the texture manger recreates the internal atlass every time.
Now when you are loading images from ASDb archive texture manager waits for all mages to be loaded into memory before it recreates its internal atlass. This is why loading them from ASDb archive is much faster.

Now if my memory serves me correctly Lifepower (the original author of Asphyre Sphix library) was planning to extend ASDb archive with ability to store already generated atlases in it and not only individual images but I'm not sure if he ever managed to implement this.

As far as ASDb archive goes. they are not intended to only store Images but also other resources like Sounds or even cusom files. So basically you could store all your game resources in them. In Asphyre Sphinx 1 ASDb files were comressed with LZ77 compression and could be enycripted with XTEA 128-bit cipher. In Asphyre Sphinx 2 and newer ZIP-like compression was used instead.

Also depending on the game you're writing you may be able to implement a caching system that leaves some images to be loaded in the background as the game is running.

As far as I know the Asphyre Sphinx texture manager does not support dynamic texture loading out of the box but I think this might be achived by using miltiple instances of texture manger at once but I have never tried it.