> In practice you need a texture atlas (...)to reduce number of meshes.
I believe you meant "to reduce number of texutre swaps"? Otherwise I fail to find how texture atlas is helping in reducing number of meshes in the drawn scene.
> But if you use texture atlas you can't combine surfaces like in the article.
Actually you can, pixel/fragment shader can be used later on to transform texture coordinates just before the texel value will be fetched (obviously this is only possible if you use shaders, but most games nowadays do).
I think he's suggesting you need a texture atlas if you have multiple terrain types, so that different areas of the merged-quad mesh might need different textures applied to it. You could get around that with multiple texture lookups and shader work, but the atlas is probably better most of the time.
I believe you meant "to reduce number of texutre swaps"? Otherwise I fail to find how texture atlas is helping in reducing number of meshes in the drawn scene.
> But if you use texture atlas you can't combine surfaces like in the article.
Actually you can, pixel/fragment shader can be used later on to transform texture coordinates just before the texel value will be fetched (obviously this is only possible if you use shaders, but most games nowadays do).