So I have this simple game engine that displays a 3D hex game board/map, that can support things like floating islands, river networks and cave systems. I have the map divided up geographically into cuboid chunks so that I can render only the parts that are near the camera and in the frustum. Each chunk has a series of dynamic buffers to draw the terrain, rivers, water levels etc. These buffers are often different sizes, as some map chunks have few rivers, or few water tiles, or sometimes in the case of floating islands there might be only one or two map tiles in the whole chunk, or the chunk might be completely empty space. This scheme is working great if I am just generating a map and displaying it. I draw what exists in my buffers each frame.

However, if this thing is ever going to be useful in a game, I need to be able to alter the map during the course of the game. It's time to make this thing change over time. But that means that I don't know the buffer's size needs at initialization time. I have to assume that every chunk is full of tiles, water and full of rivers, which in practice will be never the actual case. The problem is that not only will I have to waste memory (probably 5x as much) for empty fixed size buffers, but I'll also have to send a bunch of degenerate triangles for rendering, which is probably going to be some kind of performance hit.

All of a sudden my geographical partitioning makes a lot less sense. I wonder if any of you know of another way to handle resource data that changes in size in the described manner.

Thanks for the push in the right direction. I was foundering between option 1 and 2 in my setup, which was kinda painful and hopeless.

I'm intrigued by 'buffers go in a memory pool'. What is that exactly, a giant buffer that is maintained manually somehow? How do I put an instance buffer(misc data used by the shaders) into a memory pool and then use it in my shader?