Comment 1 for bug 1121982

I already talked with chuck about this a long time ago. I actually suggested the same idea that you propose - it is also the way S2 did things. The code coud be improved by generating a densely packed sprite map from the individual animation parts - that would improve blitting speed I think (but maybe this is not even needed).

I was suggesting doing this as a preprocessing step - a script which you basically feed the current graphics config and which outputs suitable graphic files. I even stared coding on this - unfortunately this will kill the nice graphics dir we currently have and will make understanding the graphics much harder for new contributors. This is not as much of a problem though as all animations are done in 3d anyways, so a post processing step would not hurt graphic dev as much (chuck said).