iOS7 what is the correct way to create and use SKTextureAtlas?

Question

I'm not sure of the underlying implementation of the texture atlases, so my question is - what is the correct way to deal with pulling textures out of them? I need to loop through various atlases and pull out 64 random textures.

Create a static atlas and reuse the reference to pull out textures?

static SKTextureAtlas *monsterAtlas;
static int monsterCount;

monsterAtlas = [SKTextureAtlas atlasNamed:@"monsters"];
monsterCount = [monsterAtlas textureNames].count;

//pull out a random texture
NSString* textureName = [[monsterAtlas textureNames] objectAtIndex: arc4random()%monsterCount];
SKTexture* texture = [monsterAtlas textureNamed:textureName];

-OR-

create a new atlas every time I need a texture?

SKTextureAtlas *atlas = [SKTextureAtlas atlasNamed:@"monster"];
SKTexture *f1 = [atlas textureNamed:@"monster-walk1.png"];

The reason i'm asking is that with the first approach, my code may be quite unweildy, as I would have 10+ atlas references created. Will this use too much memory? With the second approach I'm concerned that I will be doing a lot of extra work creating an atlas each time I execute a loop iteration. How should I do this?

Answer 1

Create each atlas once and keep a reference to it.

It's not unweildy if you write a class that manages atlases and gives you access to individual textures.