Thanks for the replies, guys!

After reading your replies and trying the Texture Packer directly (and not using the texture from the Export feature), I realize my issue was a very simple fix, since I can just pack the images first and refer to the resulting image.

We are using the cocos2d runtime. We're experiencing issues when there are about 20 or so units on the screen (which are composed of 8-22 bones/images depending on the unit) along with various other sprites/particle effects on an iPhone5. I don't believe the framerate drop is due to the number of spritesheet files we are using, but we shall see.

I'm currently working on a game that has a number of units that the player can spawn. At the moment, for each unit, I have a separate Spine file with a single skeleton in it (the units only move left/right, which we are using reflection to handle). These units have a number of skins and animations they use, and reference a single image directory containing only the images required for the skeleton in the file.

However, we're looking to optimize the amount of amount of memory taken up by the sprite sheets, as the performance of the game is suffering a bit when there are many units on the screen (which our developer blames on the many sprite sheets we're loading at once (although I'm not sure this is the true reason).

Thus, I'd like to minimize the number of sprite sheets we have. I'd like to specify a maximum size for the sheet and have the program export out multiple sheets, but pack the many units into as few sheets as possible (as opposed to what I have now after exporting out each unit's individual spine file alone, resulting in some files of 128x128, 256x256, I'd like to pack them all into as few 2048x2048)

Am I setting up my project incorrectly? Should I be including more than one skeleton in each file? Should my image directories be set up in a different way? Should I be using the 'include subdirectories' feature of exporting somehow? I tried looking for some documentation and in the forums for a breakdown of export options or workflow breakdowns, but I couldn't find anything too related.

Also, if this work to minimize the number of sprite sheets won't really affect the performance, are there any other options to explore in Spine that might?

Thanks!

Am I missing something very obvious here? Any input would be appreciated!