Best way to draw a grid?

[DarkDepths]

I looked at another post asking about the best way to draw lines, but I wondered if there might be a better way to do a grid than to draw 10,000 lines.

You see I need a flat grid, 100 units wide by 100 units deep. I also need to be able to zoom out to see all of the lines, but zoom in enough to see about 5 square units.

My original thought was to draw all the lines individually and change their thickness based on camera distance. However I am away from my programming computer and haven't been able to check performance.

My next thought was to draw a wireframe plane, 100x100, but then I remembered that it would all be triangulated, and it seems like a wasted 20,000 tri's.

Next I thought about a plane that would cover the area, but rather than being 20,000 tris, would use a repeated texture that I could swap on the fly to adjust resolution as the camera moves in and out. Again though, I am not sure how that kind of texture repetition would affect performance.


These are the only ideas that I came up with. If you have a better idea or can comment on the performance of my ideas, please offer them. The grid is an essential part of my game, but certainly not the most important. I can't afford to have my grid be a resource hog! Thank-you very much for all your help!

[Lonesome Ducky]

Have a texture of a white square, create a plane, and tile the texture.

[Brainsaw]

There is a GridSceneNode floating around somewhere in the forum, maybe you could give that one a try. Tested it once and it worked fine for me.

[psychophoniac]

here is a very nice one.
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ditor+grid

[Brainsaw]

Yea ... that was the one I was talking about

[DarkDepths]

Thanks, I'll try out that grid node as soon as I can!