Animation over multiple files

[Xilver]

Hey all, first poster here. Let me start off by saying that Phaser is absolutely excellent. Coming from an ActionScript background, I found Phaser wonderfully easy to start with, and I'm learning a lot every day.

 

That being said, I'm having a bit of a problem with a couple of games I'm developing for a client. After being tested on IE11 on a Windows Surface Pro 2, it seemed that a lot of the textures were black. It turns out that this is because the maximum image size for IE11 touch seems to be 2048x2048. Some of the needed spritesheets are larger.

 

I'll sketch one of the games. The camera is behind the player, and you are seeing a sort of pseudo 3D perspective. Underneath the player (a boat), moving water is flowing, to give the impression of speed. This water consists of a spritesheet of 18 frames, each frame being 1024x390. Seeing as 18 frames of this size, this won't fit in one image of max 2048x2048.

 

So my question is, what would be the best way to solve this? The only option I see is this:

Load two spritesheets, and constantly check the current frame of the animation. From the moment the last frame is reached, switch to the second spritesheet and animate that. I can be wrong, but this looks like it would be quite taxing on memory.

 

Is there a better, faster, or more performant way? Like, is there a possibility that I can use 18 separate files, and have phaser create a texture atlas in memory from those 18 files? Or would that reach the same limitations as I described above?

 

Thanks to anyone who can help me