I'm creating a Top-Down Racing Game in C++ using GLUT/OPENGL and SOIL first of all I just wanted some opinions on how the track should be done. I was thinking about using a tile-map and so far I've implemented one but it draws a polygon for each value in the tile-map then uses the assigned texture. This is obviously a really in efficient way of drawing the background.
So how to go about concatenating the appropriate texture's together into one PNG/GL-TEXTURE that way I can just draw one big polygon and use the texture created from the concatenation process.
Also what's the best way of going about collision detection when it comes to tile-maps?