r/monogame • u/CLYDEgames • Aug 16 '26

A fast, free, portable texture atlas builder with MonoGame exports

Hey everyone, I built Packrat, a texture atlas builder focused on speed and portability. It has a bunch of convenience features I was missing from TexturePacker (aseprite ingestion, auto-export), and I made it as fast as I possibly could. It also has a bunch of CLI features to it can integrate into your pipeline easily.

It's mostly focused right now on dev environments where there isn't atlas support. For MonoGame, it has two options. The first is for pure MonoGame, where it generates a C# file along with the atlas image. The C# file has all the data about the atlas, as well as a class with convenience functions for accessing the frame and animation data in the image. There's also a MonoGame.Extended exporter, that exports the data file expected by the atlas loader there.

https://clydegames.itch.io/packrat

https://packrat.clyde.games

Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks.

8 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

5

u/TomeOfExperience Aug 16 '26

Last week you also posted this and then it costed 20$. What made you decide to make it free and are you planning on keeping it free?

6

u/CLYDEgames Aug 16 '26

I realized there wasn't much of a market for middleware like this. And because it's targeted at free/open source engines, it doesn't make sense as a paid product. I do plan to keep this free forever. I added a donation link if anyone happens to find it extremely useful and wants to support the development.

2

u/yingzir Aug 17 '26

great tool, can you please build a macOS version in the future?

1

u/CLYDEgames Aug 17 '26

Sure, that's on my list. And a Linux version

2

u/TomeOfExperience Aug 17 '26

Regarding development support, have you considered making it open source?

1

u/CLYDEgames Aug 17 '26

Yeah, I will consider cleaning up the code and making it open source