Very interested to know if anyone is doing this optimization:

I notice a lot of people are scrolling their tiles or drawing them all with spritebatch/quads or something similar which sets vertices every loop.

I'm wondering if anyone has any information or experience with drawing 2D (or layered 2D) like a 3D world and simply moving the camera (but in such a way that vertices do not need updating and are screen clipped by some normal gpu culling process).. I've searched around and I don't see anyone doing this which makes me wonder if I'm missing something?

I'm thinking the advantage of this too is that different sections of the vertex list could be used each frame to animate vertex colors or add some stretch and squash animations without needing to employ shaders or update vertex data (save gpu power for other shader effects?)

Of course memory tiles would still need to be scrolled in a corresponding way to keep track of properties for character interactions but that is inconsequential.

Ah yes - linearized map blocks work well for what I'm doing. :) The layering and effects are heavy for sure(sticking to 1 big texture-source if possible) and also I'm using per-vertex coloring to add extra colored static lighting to the map. I'm thinking I could also track certain animated non-tile-associated mesh parts and translate their world position. Thanks for the ideas