Ways to avoid binding textures

Hi people,

I’m just wondering if people know of any ways to avoid loading textures and their advantages and drawbacks. One way I know is of ordering things by texture, which is a good idea, until you come to situations where you need to order by depth (billboards, blended polygons).

Another way I thought of is to use a big texture, and only draw little bits of it onto each polygon, emulating many smaller textures.

Is this a good techinque or not? I havent’ tried it and don’t know if it can help or its bad or good.

Yes, those are both good techniques that have there proper place. The tiled textures are especially handy for small sprites and low resolution lightmaps. And sorting opaque polys by texture is always a good thing to do.