


Well, I know roughly what sprites are. They are game graphics. Let me re-phase my question.
Are sprites the sources of the game graphics or the graphic instances created during the game?

May be I am not making my question clear. Let's give an example.
If I have an action game, I have a bullet.jpg file as the graphic source of the bullets. Let's say I have my game character firing his/her machine gun. Multiple bullets are fired out from the gun, so there are many rendered instances of bullet.jpg on the screen. My question now is: Is the term "Sprite" referring to the image file on the file directory - bullet.jpg(source), or each rendered output(instance) of every bullet fired out during gameplay?

I hope I got my question put up nice and clear. Hope any experienced people will help me out on such simple matter. Thank you in advanced