So I have been going through other games recently to see how they allow people to modify their elements and one that struck me as odd was Dota2. In their "mod" tools documentation they have setup a process for two mask textures to be applied, each of those textures have an RGBA setup and each channel is used for a different shader reference. This seems interesting as I thought that this type of process would bog down the draw calls and make the system more memory intensive.
What are your thoughts on this, and is there a better method to implementing more than 3 shaders? Currently we use a diffuse texture and the rest of the shaders are associated with the specular texture. Thanks for any advice you can provide in advance.
Reference Link:
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2ShaderMaskGuide.pdf