Hello, I've been working with lwjgl for a while, and I've had luck making characters move around and attaching sprites to them so they look like the chracter is moving (I haven't figured out how to do animation yet though) but I was having a lot of trouble with spritesheets after following some tutorials about using them. Is there a major benefit in speed or other benefit if you use a spritesheet over just separate images of the sprites (EG: player sprites, terrain sprite, etc all in different files)?

The main point is that it's neater, which can be a big deal. Other than that, I don't think it's that important, but I can't be sure.

Spritesheets are better for OpenGL programming as you can just render everything in one go, instead of rebinding the texture every few vertices. It's a performance thing, but it shouldn't matter in Java2D, if that's what you're using.

Since Java2D tries to use hardware acceleration under the hood, it's also wise to use sprite sheets and BufferedImage.getSubImage where possible as it may allow for better performance.

With LWJGL, sprite sheets are pretty much essential if you plan to render many sprites per frame. It should really be step 1 of optimizing any OpenGL game. Step 2 would be creating a sprite batcher, instead of using old-school glBegin/glEnd calls everywhere. If you're interested, you should check out LibGDX's sprite batcher or my own minimal sprite API here.

If you've organized your Texture wrapper well enough, then creating a sprite sheet utility should be easy as pie. See the TextureRegion source in LibGDX, for example. If your'e still struggling with basic OpenGL Texture concepts (of which texture coordinates is an essential part) then see here.

I agree that there are not too many tutorials that cover LWJGL and Java-specific OpenGL programming. This is why I'm writing my own series:
https://github.com/mattdesl/lwjgl-basics/wiki

Cheers.

The libgdx texture packer handles converting separate images into a packed spritesheet, with many features like rotation and whitespace stripping. The output is packed image(s) and a text file describing the sprite positions, so it can be used without libgdx.

In one of my former projects I used individual images. I can tell that if you want to copy like 1000 small PNGs to an USB stick, it takes like, ages. Loading is still fairly fast though.

I assume with a harddisk you don't notice this.

I then switched to zip archives containing all the small images. Makes it easier to handle, but harder to access. It allows to bundle meta data with the images though, and keeps it all together. This is a benefiot that I started to like.

It also becomes increasingly difficult to name the files, if you have them all in one folder. If you have 0000.png ... 1752.png it will become reall hard to find something.

Sprite sheets circumvent some of these problems. But if you have sprites of vastly different sizes, sheets with a fixed raster become inefficient, and you must looks for better organization of the sprites on the sheet.

I've been using both, and still couldn't make up my mind. It's not too hard to change even late in a project, though, so it wasn't a big issue for me so far.