Best Way to Create a Texture2D in Memory Mid-Game?

Help Shaders
1

Godot Version

v4.6.1.stable.steam [14d19694e]

Question

One of the things I need to be able to do in the 3D/VR game I’m working on is create a small set of textures which are generated based on the current date. There’s only a small number of these textures and thus they do not need to be saved to disk, they can simply be generated each time the game is started, but I’m trying to figure out the best way to go about it. I can think of a variety of ways but I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to the best way to go about doing this?

The textures themselves would basically just show the current date but stylized, and then those textures are arbitrarily applied to other objects in the game world, so being able to render a 2D scene and convert that into a Texture2D in memory would be the ideal approach, but the only way I can think of for doing that would be to use SubViewports and that seems like it might be overkill? I mean, I know I can set SubViewports to only update once and then never again, thus there shouldn’t be much of a performance hit from having a bunch of them which are never updated once initially generated, but I’m trying to think if maybe there’s a better way to do this.

…though I am ALSO aware that Godot 4.7 is going to have the ability to render to textures and since I’m nowhere close to finished with my game project maybe I should just wait for that feature to be ready to go?

Any thoughts and opinions on this would be appreciated! :slight_smile:

2

Subviewports are textures to be rendered too, they intend to be used as a viewport but should be as performant as the eventual drawable textures if only updated once.

3

That’s what I figured, I’m just wondering if perhaps there’s a better way than this?

4

Just do it with subviewports. That’s the optimal way.