I don't think this will be the easiest thing to integrate with the current setup of image/texture/sprite - but I think it may be beneficial to add support for
http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Array_Texture - or at least, support for the array of 2D textures (the 1D variant has its uses, but i think is not nearly as commonly used)
By support, I mean allowing the creation of something like sf::ArrayTexture and allowing sprites/shapes to have their texture set in the form of Sprite::SetTexture ( ArrayTexture &arrayTexture, unsigned int level )
This, as far as I know, would also require that all drawing be done with a custom shader.
The main reason for this request is that it would provide possibilities for speed optimizations in certain, though not very common, cases.
For example, and what caused me to think of this request:
I currently have a tile-based game, where there are 34 different tile types. Each tile type has its own texture, for a specific 'theme' - i.e. dirt tiles, concrete tiles, glass tiles, metal tiles etc.
Currently, each theme is stored 1536x1536px texture atlas, and drawing a variety of tile types that all have the same 'theme' (i.e. they're all dirt tiles) is quick.
However, drawing tiles that all have different themes still requires a number of texture switching between the texture atlas for each theme. (a workaround to minimize this would be to sort the tiles by type when drawing, but it's still not as efficient as using a array texture)
Since all of my texture atlases are the same size, it would ideal to stick them in an Array Texture - and I would, except there's no easy way to supply this information to the sf::Sprite class.
Thanks!
