Hayer! What's going on man
Here's a description of what I'll be doing, and I'm pretty sure Van B is doing the exact same thing.
Do you remember that 32x32 matrix, which in turn becomes a tile for a larger 10x10 matrix composed of those 32x32 matrices as each of it's tiles example (lol)?
Well, I'm not exactly there yet, so I might be off on a few things, but take this into heavy consideration.
When I started learning about texture brushing I too was under the impression I had to mess with the UV's a lot and paint each one individually. Forget about individual UV stuff and think larger. Think color mask shaders. For each one of those 32x32 tiles in that 10x10 matrix, a color mask shader will be there.
Whats a color mask shader you ask? Green Gandalf wrote a shader that takes an image, looks at it's rgb values and decides to place what texture where based on those rgb values and their positions. Now, right about now your thinking, well, that limits me to 3 textures. Right. But, Van B has modified that shader to be able to output 6 textures, which IS a good amount. But if your still not satisfied, think about how I have one shader running on each of my 32x32 tiles. Whats to say I can't use a certain combination of 6 textures on one tile, and a different combination of textures on the tile over? (Still thinking that last bit through)
However, if I have a 10x10 matrix, thats 100 shaders running, and that's a lot of requirements. But, that's where you need to get fancy with culling and other FPS requirements. Actually, right now, without culling, my 100 tiled matrix takes about 10 seconds to load, which isn't bad considering I haven't done much to optimize the code or start culling. In short, there is a lot that could be done to help this shader thing along.
A problem that I'm going to have to think about it order to get larger terrains per map is about the amount of limbs DBP likes... Right now, I've heard DBP only likes to work with 256 limbs at a time, it CAN do more, it just doesn't like it (stupid). So... if your already doing the math, that limits me to a 16x16(256) tiled matrix. I already know I can halfway combat this by simply increasing the stile size from 32x32 to like 128x128. But then the shaders take longer to load. When the time comes, I need to ask Van B what he does with his because he's doing the same thing with the color mask.
Want to see how sexy things can get with a color mask shader? This is a pic from Van B's editor.
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" -Isaac Newton
