I want to reduce draw calls on my isometric map implementation so I thought about combining multiple meshes and draw them in one go. I am currently creating a mesh from all tiles in a 8x8 "chunk". This means a mesh containing floors, walls and objects. These floors, walls and objects are just quads placed along the regular axis where Y is up. A rotated orthographic camera provides the isometric projection matrix. Most floors and walls fill up the full quad with an opaque texture but some, and most objects have alpha transparency like a window, broken floor or a chair object. I am building the "chunk" mesh by adding individual meshes to it, I do this in order of drawing back to front and bottom to top otherwise the combined chunk mesh is not properly rendered at all. I render all of the needed chunks also in the same order and this works great.
However the drawing problems start when I need to add additional objects "inside" these mesh chunks. For example a moving player which is also just a quad with a transparent texture. I need to be able to put him inside that chunk mesh, perhaps on a tile where he is in front of a wall and behind a window. If I would render the player prior to the chunk, it's transparent pixels would not show the chunk mesh. If I would render the player after the chunk the player would not be visible trough a transparent quad in the chunk. If this could be solved easily and not to expensive on the CPU/GPU that would be the solution to my question. However I am considering myself new to OpenGL so I do not know it's magic very well.
I can think of a view solutions to tackle this problem that do not involve OpenGL:
- Dump the chunk mesh method and just draw back to front. I either need a more efficient way of drawing or don't allow to zoom out as much to reduce draw calls since this is a bottleneck.
- Get rid of the quads with transparency and make them full 3D. I feel this should be a design choice and not a mandatory thing, besides that it would add a lot of additional work to creating all these assets. Now I just have a textures projected on a quad instead of fully UV'd models with individual textures.
- Draw all transparent objects after the chunks in proper order. This feels kinda hacky and error prone since some objects need to go into that chunk mesh and some don't.
- Only combine floors in a batch mesh. The floors are the biggest bottleneck, the bottom of the map has all floor tiles filled which are about 4000 draw calls when drawn individually, a big building uses a lot of floors too for each Z level. Walls and objects are drawn significantly less, probably just a couple hundred maximum all the way zoomed out. SO for each chunk draw all floors in one call and then each individual object, I'd reduce draw calls a lot by just combining the floors. When drawing walls and objects I have to check if there is a potential dynamic object to be rendered or just check if there are dynamic objects within the chunk and sort them with all the walls and objects before drawing them.
This is how I currently render.
Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL20.GL_DEPTH_TEST);
Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL20.GL_BLEND);
Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL20.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
shader.begin();
shader.setUniformMatrix("u_worldView", cam.combined);
// If I draw the player before the chunk the transparency of the player would not render the chunk.
player.getMesh().render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
// Drawing the mesh chunk combines of floors, walls and objects of each tile within the chunk.
chunk.getCombinedMesh().render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
// If I draw the player after the chunk the player would not be drawn if it is behind a transparent mesh like a window or a tree.
player.getMesh().render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
shader.end();
So what are my options here? Can I fix this by using some magic tricks out of the OpenGL hat? Or do you have another suggestion to put on the list above? I am using LibGDX for my project.