Huge grid question

Hi All,

I am trying to make an huge grid in the style of Minesweeper. What I want the player to be able to do is to scroll around the grid and to zoom in and out to see the whole grid or a specific part of it. Each grid tile has a number or a symbol on it.

I am a bit confused on how to tackle this. Making a huge grid made up of quads is not a good way of doing this I would guess, since that would be inefficient. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to tackle this?

 

How big is the grid actually going to be? I personally wouldn't create a grid of actual objects.

 

Wait maybe you might have to since each grid item would have to be modifiable right?

 

Yeah, each tile would be modifiable. Not too hard to store that in a 2D array though. The problem is scrolling trough a huge number of tiles. There is no use them actually existing if they are not in view.

 

how big is the grid going to be? I'm sure it'll be fine unless it's something like 10k x 10k ..

 

The largest grid I worked with was 100 x 100 and that performed fine.

 

You have some options.

- Use a projector with grid texture
- Use dirctional light with cookie set to gridmaterial
- Use GL class to render lines

GL class is maybe most flexible but a projector is easier to set up. However, I noticed some bug where the grid isnt completely projected whenever I zoom out too much. A directional light with cookie doesnt have this issue but it dramatically increases drawcalls. Projectors work good on flat surfaces, on a sloped surface the texture might get noticeablely stretched.

Last of all choices would be line renderer but since a line renderer means a drawcall it's not a viable option.

 

But how would I use that when scrolling? Also, I want to depict numbers on the different grid tiles. How would I do that efficiently?

 

You could have a class for your grid item. Which has the value on. Then Instantiate the prefab on start

Something like this(pseudo code)

Public Class gridItem {
Int xPos
Int yPos
Int value
}

Public class your mono behavior {
Public gridItem[] myGridItemsArray;

Start () {
//initialise your grid
}
}