I couldn't find anything about my issue online, maybe because I don't know how to express my question.

I'm using a tilemap to use different textures during the same draw call. But when I enable for example linear filtering instead of using nearest, my textures start to look weird. The filtering seems to take pixels from outside the specified area (using texture coordinates)...

Is there an easy solution for this that doesn't involve hacking? Maybe an option to specify that it will use the texels from the other side of the specified region instead of the texel outside of the specified texture "range"?

Is there an easy solution for this that doesn't involve hacking?

Absolutely. Use an array texture. They've been available since OpenGL 3.0.

Is there an easy solution for this that doesn't involve hacking?

Absolutely. Use an array texture. They've been available since OpenGL 3.0.

Thanks for your reply. I haven't heard of array textures before, I'm pretty new to OpenGL.

but be aware that if you are limited by the number of hardware texture units, you may still be better off using atlases (perhaps even in conjunction with array textures).

This quote from the page you linked suggests however that you're still limited by the number of hardware texture units. I want to have the possibility of more than a hundred different textures but as most GPU's only support 32 or so (according to some pages I found), I doubt if this is a solution... Am I wrong?

This quote from the page you linked suggests however that you're still limited by the number of hardware texture units. I want to have the possibility of more than a hundred different textures but as most GPU's only support 32 or so (according to some pages I found), I doubt if this is a solution... Am I wrong?

A single array texture (GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY in your case) is bound to a single texture unit / sampler. It is not so that you allocate more than a single unit because the array texture has more than 1 slice.

But notice that 1D /2D array textures have (may have, at least) another maximal size compared to "ordinary" 1D / 2D textures. On my computer, for example, an array texture can be as big as 2k by 2k texels by 2k slices, while a 2D texture can be as big as 8k by 8k texels. Use the following getters to be informed about the respective texture sizes:

Thank you both! I think this wil work. My textures will generally only be 32 by 32 so that's definitely enough.