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I recently learned how to create shaders and was looking to make a simple top down game, starting with a tilemap. The problem I encountered, Whilke I can store a vbo of all the blocks in a "chunk" of blocks, I can't specify what texture it should have... or at least I don't see how! I could just bind the texture using GL.BindTexture() function, but that would only allow me to use one texture in the whole chunk! I don't know how many textures I might render, it could certainly be more than 8! Is there a way to bind a texture inside a vertex shader?

I basicly would like to do something like "Display Lists" in earlier opengl versions... but I want to use modern opengl techinques as much as possible!

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Solution 1: Texture Atlas where you can tweak the UV coords in your mesh to specify a subsection of the texture to use for a portion of your map. This solution requires that each "tile" of the map be a separate quad so you can control the UV coords of each corner... sharing verticies at the corners of a tile will not work right.

Solution 2: if you are doing more like terrain than a tile map, texture splatting uses one texture to control the blending of texture data from several other textures to decide what the final pixel color is... a simple version could use RGBA data from the splat map to blend the colors from 4 other texture maps to create the final output... more complicated systems sometimes use multiple vertex colors to blend colors from 4/8/12 textures, but due to limitations in the number of samplers allowed in a pixel shader, this tends to take multiple shader passes.

Number 1 is probably what you want for a true top down tile mapped game.. but maybe texture splatting will give you other ideas :)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I underestand what you mean with texture atlas and it's certainly more attractive than texture splatting... but I clearly have a huge limitation on textures if I wanted to render them with animations or slightly different textures (eg: a block that changes its borders according to its neighbours). Could I create an array that contains the gpu ids of my loaded textures and then call them in the shader? some sort of glBindTexture in the shader code itself? \$\endgroup\$
    – Philippe Paré
    Sep 17, 2014 at 2:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ Common solution would be to separate "static" and "dynamic" geometry. Lots of cheap static geometry and small amount of more expensive dynamic geometry. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jari Komppa
    Sep 17, 2014 at 6:15

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