Custom Sprite Batcher in LibGDX
This is an advanced tutorial that will deal with shaders, meshes, camera matrices, texture handling, and various other concepts. Ensure you have read and understand the following before continuing:
As we know from previous tutorials, we can send float data to a shader with uniforms (vec2, vec3, etc). The problem is, however, that we need to flush the SpriteBatch before changing the uniform. Imagine each of our sprites require a different uniform value; this would lead to a lot of flushing, and it defeats the benefits of a SpriteBatch in the first place.
The solution is to use vertex attributes -- this allows us to send data to the shader per-vertex as opposed to per-batch. We already use vertex attributes to send RGBA colors per sprite, or texture coordinates per vertex. There are a number of situations where custom vertex data will prove useful, but for our cases let's use it for multi-texturing.
Let's say we're developing a simple puzzle game with many varieties of jigsaw pieces. Here are a couple of them:
Here is an example of a photo we'd like to slice up:
We could develop this app in a number of ways, but for the purpose of the tutorial we'll implement a solution that applies the mask in real-time. This means that our "photo" source could actually be a dynamic image (like a rotating 3D cube), or a video (like webcam input). It also means the user can choose their own photos (e.g. from their phone) and crop/pan/zoom them as desired.
We could apply the same techniques discussed in Shader Lesson 4 to achieve the masking, and we'd probably get decent frame rates. However, for more optimized rendering, such as a scene with many jigsaw pieces, we may need a different technique. The "big two" optimizations in 2D sprite rendering are:
- Reducing texture binds by packing all sprites into a TextureAtlas.
- "Batching" many sprites into a single draw call