Struggling with the basics

[NibblyPig]

So I started with phaser 3, but a lack of examples on the site made me switch to phaser 2. Phaser 2 I was struggling to get anything to work properly, so I have switched to pixi js instead as I don't want a physics engine or anything crazy.

All I want to do is render graphics to the screen. I will take care of everything else myself.

So I looked at the examples and I have what I would call a spritesheet, it has lots of different tiles on. All I wanted to do was load it so I could draw whatever tile I wanted at whatever co-ordinates.

The example on the pixi js is for animation. I don't want to do any animation (yet). Also every tile is 16x16 so I didn't really want to create a giant json file with thousands of lines. I tried to use some free tools to create the JSON file anyway because I couldn't figure out how else to do it, but none of them seemed to do what I wanted. TexturePacker didn't seem to, neither did Shoebox, although their documentation was lacking and the UI was incredibly unintuitive.

In Phaser 2 I found I could do this:  `this.load.spritesheet('walls', '/assets/TileSpritesheet.png', 16, 16);`

I feel like I am failing at even the most basic of operations so I wonder if I am missing something obvious, perhaps a really good tutorial video or something. I've programmed before in XNA and monogame and made a few 2d games, the only functionality I require is to be able to render sprites to the screen.

Can anyone suggest what I should do? I have a lot of tiles so splitting it into individual pngs would be very tedious.

[ivan.popelyshev]

JSON format works fine. Both TexturePacker and Shoebox are good to make pixi spritesheets. Just follow our only good y tutorial for pix basicsi: https://github.com/kittykatattack/learningPixi 

As for tiles, when Sprites will be too slow for you, I recommend to look at https://github.com/pixijs/pixi-tilemap and https://github.com/Alan01252/pixi-tilemap-tutorial This plugin was developed for rpgmaker MV.

[NibblyPig]

Thank you that tutorial looks exactly like what I was missing. I'll take your advice about the tilemap too when I get to it! Thanks!