I''m creating an iso game using d3d, and I have a fairly large set of textures that I am working with. I am rendering around 700 triangles for the landscape, and I may be using any number of the textures just to render one screen. I am using both 64x64 textures and 128x128 textures, and I would like to have at least 100 64x64 textures and 50 128x128 textures buffered. My question is... Should I have one texture surface and one plain surface, using the plain surface to buffer the textures and then blitting them to the texture surface when I need to use them. Or should I use some clever buffering scheme composed of many different texture surfaces. It appears to me that method one would be the easiest and most efficient. It would eliminate calls to SetTexture(); blitting from vram to vram is fast; and I would be able to store the textures linearly in a plain surface, greatly simplifying my buffering code. Of course, that''s why I posted here. I may be completely delusional and have no good idea of what I''m doing. Please let me know if this is true. Thanks. Oh... One more question. I''ve read that most cards have a max texture size of 256x256. Is this correct?

The Voodoo 3 (which came out after the TNT i believe) and below, only supports max of 256x256. Later Voodoos support much higher texture sizes. (Thats possibly ~25% of your playing market that have a 3dfx - V3 or below.)

Adam "Nutz" Hoult
VB Gaming Central

Edited by - daedalusd on July 29, 2000 6:24:08 PM

Thanks for the responses. I''m using a Voodoo 3, so that explains my texture limit.

About the 700 triangles... I meant 700 quads, or 1400 triangles. And that is only the total triangles per screen. The entire map is composed of ~25,000,000 tiles. *chuckles* 700 tiles... That would be a mighty small map.

Any ideas on the texture caching problem? I''m probably going to test it myself, but I don''t like to base my work on the results of one machine.