First, I would like to say that this tool is amazing! Thank you for your hard work!
Second, I know what I'm proposing is a lot of work, expecially because I could just manually edit or script edit the .amproject file to create the atlas layers, and then open AtlasMaker and run it. So my feelings won't get hurt if you say "No thanks, way to much work" :-).
Again, all of this may be out of scope of what you want to do for this project, but I think it would streamline some peoples workflows.
Command-Line Interface (CLI) for Batch Atlas Generation
Summary
This would let us define an Atlas Layer (ie: enemy) in an AtlasMaker project and then run a script that loops through a set of folders/images to create atlases in bulk - ideal for large libraries (I have 86 enemy images).
The Why
- Automation & Scale: Creating dozens of atlases via the UI (or manually editing the project file) can be slow and error prone. The duplicate feature helps with this but I still screw up at times (more often than I would like to admit).
- Deterministic builds: Consistent packing with fixed settings is important for reproducible releases, and my sanity.
- Pipeline integration: We can hook atlas generation into build steps
- Headless environments: I could see this being used as a server-side tool for people that might need that.
Proposed Workflow
- In the AtlasMaker project, define an Atlas Layer (ie named 'enemy') and its settings.
- Run a CLI command that selects the project (.amproject) the atlas layer (ie: enemy) and packs sources into one or more atlases with configured settings.
- Output both the packed textures and json
CLI usage example (obviously you would know better than me what would be needed but I thought this may help in understanding what I'm asking):
atlasmaker.exe --project "proj.amproject"
--layer "enemy"
--input "C:\images\enemies"
--output "C:\atlases"
--name "enemies"
--overwrite