Background information
I am in the process of making a game engine so I have complete, explicit control over everything, anything is an option. I desire to make procedurally generated 3D terrain. It's mostly coming along quite well actually.
I am however, having a difficult time finding any good information on how exactly destructible terrain can be done optimally. I think the mesh deformations could be done at run-time and written to disk but the issue I encounter there is the desire to have ore and similar resources under the ground. I've had the idea to layer additional maps for each unit length of depth but that just seems like it'd have a heavier impact on performance than I'd like.
I know it's of course possible to do that but how to do it efficiently is what I'm interested in here. Perhaps I'm just using bad keywords when I search for information but I'm not turning up much of anything of use on this topic.
I've gone beyond just Perlin Noise for the generation as well using various other algorithms for layers such as vegetation, ground cover like small rocks, etc. By generating the texture maps using the techniques I'm sure we're all familiar with.
A lot of the ideas I've been coming up with would work I suppose but I don't like the obvious impact of performance my ideas have been so far.
Eventually of course I'd have a layer of solid indestructible bedrock but I can't figure out a way better than having a texture map for each layer down per unit length. So if I had a depth of 60 units before hitting the layer of solid bedrock that would mean 60 texture maps. I don't like that at all. Surely there is a better way. I've seen a lot of games not render or even generate the underground at all during initial creation of the game world and do that at run-time but I can't figure out how ore and similar resources could be generated in varying depth layers effectively on initial creation of the world. If the map is color coding by resource it wouldn't exactly work to also color code the height as you would with a height map. It must be one or the other.
Question
The problem I'm having now is underground. What would be the best way to implement underground layers in a performance friendly way that doesn't involve an excessive number of textures used?
