Hello all,
I'm trying to find out some opinions related to rendering techniques for a procedural minecraft like terrain system made of cubes. It's just a toy and a learning experience for me.
So, my question for the community is how to store/use textures in regards to the vertices in question. It'd be fewer vertices for certain if I merge adjacent faces that would use the same image. The only way I know to do this without a buffer per image would be to abuse the wrapping capabilities of the graphics card by storing faces in strips. Then I could use a vertical strip and a horizontal strip of possible face images as two atlases depending on if the faces are merged vertically or horizontally.
I could also simply use a typical atlas map with 4 vertices per face. It's simple, works well, and there's no tricks going on that might result in more texture swapping than desirable.
Any other possibilities anyone else knows of that might be a performance increase? If nothing else, I'm considering storing a vertex buffer per face normal (that's 6 buffers) per chunk and rendering those individually to perform a software like backface culling. Depending on the chunk size, that might be a decrease or an increase in performance (overhead of draw calls).. not too sure.
