I'm still at the very early stages of my game design -- nowhere near actually needing the sprites yet -- but a thought occurred to me: What's the best way to approach sprites of different dimensions?
In context, my game will use sprites to represent different space ships (long-range plans include a 3D engine with actual ship models, but for now it's 2D with simple sprites). I've always thought of using sprite sheets as the best way to handle multiple different sprites in games. But some of my ships will be bigger than others. So while one ship might be represented by a 20x15 sprite, another might be 25x18.
How should I best approach this? One sprite sheet and somehow include in my sprite objects the dimension of each frame? Or should I group the sprites into different sprite sheets based on their size? Or should every frame on the sheet be the same size (the "biggest"), and just not use up the entire area for every sprite? Maybe abandon sprite sheets entirely in this case?