While this is true, it becomes much harder to customise things. Say you only want to modify one piece image: you now need to duplicate all other piece images as well. What if an original piece changes and you want to import those changes into your modified piece set? You now need to edit the combined file.kbhearn wrote:single file has the advantage of ease of distribution/configuration. you just have to point the gui at a single file. i assume most graphics editors would allow you to use a layer per piece and assign custom ids to the layers, but if not you could always use text editing to combine seperate files later.
Of course, I may be used to how XBoard handles this, but multiple images packed in one file strikes me as solving a problem that can easily be solved in a different way, while introducing new complications of its own.
If instead of a file you point to a directory of piece images (with standardised names, but you do that with layers anyway) you solve both problems: you can have a "default" set to fall back to if a piece is not found in the requested theme, so you never need to duplicate a piece; even if you do, updating is as easy as copying a file.
So from a maintainability/scalability point of view, I think one file per piece image is superior...
