1) You should allocate as many texture names as you need. One for each texture you are using.
Loading a texture is a very heavy operation that stalls the rendering pipeline. So, you should never load textures inside your game loop. You should have a loading state before the application state in which you render the textures. The loading state is responsible for loading all the textures needed in the rendering. So when you need to render your geometry, you will have all the textures loaded and you don't have to worry about that anymore.
Note that after you don't need the textures anymore, you have to delete them using glDeleteTextures.
2) If you mean by infer that you need different textures for different levels or something similar, then you should process the level data in the loading state and decide which textures need to be loaded.
On the other hand, if you need to paint text (like current score), then things get more complicated in OpenGL. You will have the following options: prerender the needed text to textures (easy), implement your own bitmap font engine (harder) or use Bitmap and Canvas pair to generate textures on the fly (slow).
If you have limited set of messages to be shown during the game, then I would most probably prerender them to textures as the implementation is pretty trivial.
For the current score it is enough to have a texture which has a glyph for numbers from 0 to 9 and to use that to render arbitrary values. The implementation will be quite straightforward.
If you need longer localized texts then you need to start thinking about the generating textures on the fly. Basically you would create an bitmap into which you render text using a Canvas. Then you would upload it as a texture and render it as any other texture. After you don't need it any more, then you would delete it. This option is slow and should be avoided inside the application loop.
3) Concerning textures and to get the best out of the GPU you should keep at least the following things in your mind (these things will get a bit more advanced, and you should bother with them only after you get the application up and running and if you need to optimize the frame rate):
- Minimize texture changes as it is a slow operation. Optimally you should render all the objects using the same texture in a batch. Then change the texture and render the objects
needing that and so on.
- Use texture atlases to minimize the number of textures (and texture changes)
- If you have lots of textures, you could need to use other bit depths than 8888 to make all your textures to fit in to the memory. Using lower bit depths may also improve performance.
As explained in 'OpenGLES preloading textures in other thread' there are two separate steps: bitmap creation and bitmap upload. In most cases you should be fine by just doing the bitmap creation on a secondary thread --- which is fairly easy.
If you experience frame drops while uploading the textures, call texImage2D from a background thread. To do so you'll need to create a new OpenGL context which shares it's textures with your rendering thread because each thread needs it's own OpenGL context.
EGLContext textureContext = egl.eglCreateContext(display, eglConfig, renderContext, null);
Getting the parameters for eglCreateContext is a little bit tricky. You need to use setEGLContextFactory on your SurfaceView to hook into the EGLContext creation:
@Override
public EGLContext createContext(final EGL10 egl, final EGLDisplay display, final EGLConfig eglConfig) {
EGLContext renderContext = egl.eglCreateContext(display, eglConfig, EGL10.EGL_NO_CONTEXT, null);
// create your texture context here
return renderContext;
}
Then you are ready to start a texture loading thread:
public void run() {
int pbufferAttribs[] = { EGL10.EGL_WIDTH, 1, EGL10.EGL_HEIGHT, 1, EGL14.EGL_TEXTURE_TARGET,
EGL14.EGL_NO_TEXTURE, EGL14.EGL_TEXTURE_FORMAT, EGL14.EGL_NO_TEXTURE,
EGL10.EGL_NONE };
EGLSurface localSurface = egl.eglCreatePbufferSurface(display, eglConfig, pbufferAttribs);
egl.eglMakeCurrent(display, localSurface, localSurface, textureContext);
int textureId = loadTexture(R.drawable.waterfalls);
// here you can pass the textureId to your
// render thread to be used with glBindTexture
}
I've created a working demonstration of the above code snippets at https://github.com/perpetual-mobile/SharedGLContextsTest.
This solution is based on many sources around the internet. The most influencing ones where these three:
Best Solution
You can load a texture from disk to memory on any thread you like, using any tool you wish for reading the files.
However, when you bind it to OpenGL, it's going to need to be handled on the same thread as the rendering for that OpenGL context. That being said, this discussion suggests that using a PBO in a second thread is an option, and can speed up the process.