Texturing a Random Checkerboard?

I have been racking my brains on a texturing problem for a week and have no solution so I am throwing the question up here for the community... Help!

I am trying to achieve a checker board effect on a large square mesh (single surface). The checker pattern is randomized at the start of the game so I can not used a static grid texture and apply it to the mesh. I have successfully loaded a small UV mapped texture and can place this one "square" on the mesh at any location I wish. Now I need to place another 20 or so on the same mesh to create my game board. To keep things simple I really want to use only one mesh for the board and not a set of "tiles". I have no idea how to best achieve this.

My first thought was to use multitexturing but that would be completely inefficient and has extreme limitations. What I think needs to be achieved is to paint or stamp each little square onto the mesh texture at run time. Am I on the right track here?

The code is rather long and complex but starts off by creating a mesh, a surface and 4 vertices at 0,0,0 + 100,0,0 + 100,0,100 + 0,0,100 linked to the surface. I then connect the vertices to create two triangles from v0+v1+v2 and v0+v2+v3. I then color the mesh white.

Next I clear the textureflags and load a 16x16 UV clamped texture which is completely red (one square). I then scale the texture by .10, .10. Finally I texture the board mesh on texture layer 2 and position the UV on the texture so the square appears where I need it.

All thoughts and comments appreciated!

-- X2

A quick, dirty way is simply to have a 2x2 check texture applied to your quad and then simply multiply the UV's of the quad appropriately so the texture is repeated across it.

A better way, probably, is to build your board mesh of individual quads - one for each board square.

Well the grid is not uniform so pattern repetition is not possible. I.e., There maybe a squares across the north (top) side of the mesh and diminishing in frequency as they progress to the south (bottom) side.

Think: A pyramid of squares displayed on a square surface.

As I stated previously, I was really hoping to avoid a game board consisting of individual quads. Doing so will add an additional level of complexity to the code as well as increasing the triangle and surface counts. (Note to self: I could possibly code this using just 1 or 2 surfaces.)

Looking at other game examples, how would one apply a snow texture to the peaks of a terrain MESH (not terrain)? Obviously this could be painted offline with a static mesh but if mountains had been generated dynamically then a function to locate high points and change the texture would be required. Maybe the answer lies along the lines of a terrain editor or paint program?

BTW Chris, I used your Juicy Fonts utility on a project a few years ago and it was hands down the best tool for the job!

Thanks -- X2

How big is your board exactly? Creating a quad per square, setting it's uv's and addmesh to the whole board entity isn't going to be a hardship surely?




Stevie

Thanks for the feedback but my goal in posting here was to learn something new in B3D. If what I'm asking about can not be accomplished with Blitz and I learn as much, then I have achieved my goal.

Let's say my next project was a plane with randomly sized and placed circles on the plane? The only way I can think to accomplish this would be to create one very large texture, draw all the circles on it then apply the texture to the plane. Ok, I could probably do this on a few textures using transparency and get the desired effect.

Does anyone know of a way to cookie cutter and stamp a reasonably high quality texture all over a plane at random locations?

Maybe I should move this to the advanced 3D forum?

-- X2

*bump*