koobas.hobune.stream
In an open world game, how big should texture atlases be?
Should they be limited to the relating parts of objects? Should they be all of the structures? The entire games textures? At what point is a atlas more costly than helpful in this type of game?
I'm assuming you want to keep them somewhat apart to be able to unload unused parts.
What's the best kind of fruit? And how many of them does it take to make a salad?
just looking for general idea, in the ballpark, because it's newer concept for me.
or at least what logic to follow when planning out their sizes
best thing to think of is whats going to be seen together or in the camera view at any time, so inside building you may have decals, lights, ornaments and what not so anything that will be in a lot of the buildings put in the same atlas.
an atlas max size is 4096x4096 but with some clever work you can chop up empty space and fit more textures inside of it.
foliage is another good example f you want loads of variations of plants shove all there textures inside the same atlas and either combine the objects or let batching do the work for you if you have pro of course.
couple disadvantages, can take longer to load, may be a waste if most of the time you have one texture being used in a massive atlas. and you can only use one type of shader with an atlas else theres no real point. so you need to think about whats going in it before you put it in
The absolute max size will be limited by the device you are deploying to (e.g. earlier versions of mobile devices).
What is best for you is not necessarily the same as for everyone else. I would suggest determining the smallest texture sizes you are happy with for all your individual objects, and then sensibly combining the relevant ones into an atlas (i.e. if you have a number of scenes with only a few of the textures being used then you may not want to load the entire atlas - so try keeping those separate). Once you have done this deploy it to your intended device and simply try it out.
