How to make use of texture arrays aka "Onion textures"?

[kutu-dev]

I'm new in graphics programming I'm confused about the terminology of a texture array (aka "onion texture") vs an array of textures.

I'm making a simple Minecraft clone an I've read that for making greedy meshing and texture tiling easier I should use a texture array (sampler2Darray on Vulkan, the one that is limited to only one resolution) but as far as my knowledge goes the example texture_arrays is using an array of textures, am I wrong?

Does wgpu have support for sampler2Darray-like textures? If it does, where can I find more info about how to implement it?

[cwfitzgerald]

Yes, take a look at https://docs.rs/wgpu/latest/wgpu/type.TextureDescriptor.html#structfield.dimension and set the dimension to 2D, but add a depth greater than 1. This can then be used with texture_2d_array<f32> in the shader

[kutu-dev]

So I set the dimension field to TextureDimension::2D and then on the size field I set the number of textures in depth_or_array_layers, am I right?

[cwfitzgerald]

Correct.

[kutu-dev]

Great! Thanks for the help!