Original Post
Over the past week I've been doing a lot of research on how to do my graphics engine. The game the engine is targeted at is an Iso3d tile based flooring that supports different corner heights for the tiles; in other words just a normal terrain that is using small tiles to compose the texture. I'm getting ready to code the engine now though so I was hoping I could get a little more input before I commit myself. As I did state before I've read a couple DirectX/Direct3D books and many articles on the subjects I felt would help me. After my research and a previous posting on here this is what I've come up with: The tile sizes I'm using are 32x32 pixels so to fill the screen a large number of these tiles will need to be rendered. I'll also be offering around 200 different tiles that could be used for floor tiles (and I expect many of those to be used on every map) so that limits my possibilities a little. Calling SetTexture is supposed to be a drain, so I guess what I should do is split my map into 256x256 pixel sections (8x8 tile sections). For each of these sections a texture will be created and the actual tiles will be placed onto this texture. This will turn 64 SetTexture calls into one during render time. Of course, I'd only store the sections that are to be displayed and those in surrounding sections to make sure rendering will always be smooth. That seems like a decent plan to me, the only sticking point I'm having is what will be the most efficient way for me to display these 256x256 textures? They are to be placed onto terrain with hills and valleys so I would think a mesh would be the best place for me to render these sections onto. Currently I'm planning on creating a different mesh for each 256x256 section and placing them using a world transform. My only overt question in this message would really be is there another way I could do the meshs? Would it be possible to actually create one map mesh then render these map subsections onto this mesh at the offsets I specify? I've looked and couldn't find any information on doing just that! So I've sort of figured that it's not really possible. Then again I noticed the skinned mesh in the DXSDK. That is taking a tga file and splitting it into different parts and rendering it onto the mesh. But one issue with that could be that they are still only using one texture. Please review my plans and if you have any suggestions or a possible answer to the question I posed, your responses will greatly help. Keith http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=275447 was the post that I refered to as perviously posting. It has a little more information in it about what I'm doing. (Just thought I'd note it incase anyone wanted to reference back to it)