difference between a Sprite and a Shape.

[vams]

I everyone,
another noob question from vams :
What's the difference between a Sprite and a Shape with an attached texture?
More precisely, what are Sprite needed for if I can just put the same texture on a rectangular shape?

[zsbzsb]

Sprites is directly for defining how a texture gets displayed. A shape can be used to display a texture in the shape you want it, a sprite can not do this. A sprite is needed because making a rectangle shape for every texture is more cumbersome and has slightly more overhead and at the same time just over complicates your code.

[eXpl0it3r]

Both classes are higher class abstraction of a textured quad and thus both come with different helper functions. So in the end it doesn't really matter what you use as long as it does work.

If you want to go a step down from the abstraction, you'll want to take a look at the sf::VertexArray, since that will be able to use a textured quad directly.