Making Big Grass Tiled Backgrounds in XNA

By David Amador / April 19, 2010 / Game Development, Tutorials / 11 Comments

I’ve seen this quite a bit around on XNA forums and got 2 emails last week asking about this:

I want to make a 3000×3000 grass background by tiling this small grass image I have. Should I make one big image or should I make a for cycle drawing the image (3000/TileSize) times?

My answer is neither of them. The big image has a huge impact on every Draw and more, you are limiting your map to the max Texture Size the graphic card can handle.

The drawing lots of small images can actually work, if they are few. Let’s say your small texture size is 64×64. That means in order to fill up the 3000×3000 you have to draw it (3000/64) = 47 times. Since it’s a 3000×3000 that sums to (47×47) = 2209 Draws. Just for a background. Not to mention the rest of the actual game :P

What if you could do this in just one Draw()?

It’s very very easy to achieve this effect by setting TextureAddressMode to Wrap. Basically giving it a bigger Rectangle but telling to wrap the texture so you are gonna get tiles =)

     spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend,SpriteSortMode.Immediate,SaveStateMode.None);
     GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].AddressU = TextureAddressMode.Wrap;
     GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].AddressV = TextureAddressMode.Wrap;

Next we draw a texture with a big source rectangle

     Rectangle source = new Rectangle(0, 0, 400, 200);
     spriteBatch.Draw(texture, Vector2.Zero, source, Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0.5f);

So instead of this:

You end up with this:

On a small test I made, using a 30000×30000 Rectangle I got a frame drop to 35 FPS by doing tons of regular Draws, when switching to Wrap mode a solid 60 FPS.

As I told you it’s very easy. I’ll write more advance tutorial one of this days on how to achieve cool effect like mixing two textures with a noise/normal map.

You can play with this sample by downloading it here.

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11 Comments

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  2. Mikea
    April 20, 2010 at 10:42
    Reply

    Great article. I didin’t knew that and it sure would help a lot of people in their games.

    thanks

  3. Alexandre Chohfi
    April 23, 2010 at 5:07
    Reply

    GREAT POST! Already started to use this on my games! Thanks a lot!

  4. Dasa
    March 3, 2011 at 10:41
    Reply

    Interesting.
    But it would be better to draw only the visible brackground?

  5. Pingback: Scrolling Textures in XNA | David Gouveia

  6. Ramon
    October 7, 2011 at 0:16
    Reply

    I’ve been looking for tutorial like this, thank you very much, but the sample didn’t compile after conversion with VS 2010/XNA 4, errors complained about SaveStateMode and SpriteBlendMode.

    Could you please update the code/upload newer sample?

  7. bradpako
    May 26, 2012 at 19:02
    Reply

    In VS 2010, XNA 4.0

    spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.BackToFront,
                        BlendState.AlphaBlend,
                        SamplerState.PointWrap,
                        null,
                        null,
                        null,
                        null);
  8. Johan
    June 3, 2012 at 15:31
    Reply

    I’m getting the “Create new Samplerstate instance error after using Bradpako’s code, how do I Create a new SamplerState?

  9. bradpako
    June 3, 2012 at 22:35
    Reply

    You should not use the code:
    GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].AddressU = TextureAddressMode.Wrap;
    GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].AddressV = TextureAddressMode.Wrap;

    This is read only. No need to use it for me.

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