I'm working on an implementation of a hand-drawn map in my game, and it occurred to me to ask about the way Godot handles assets in memory before I commit to one course of action or another.
It's a big map hex map. Two of them, actually -- one b&w and one in color. As the player traverses the map, I'm using a shader to reveal one layer of the map or the other. My current implementation is to have my Tile scene contain a sprite instance of each map. Within the Tile scene, I position the graphic to be the correct section that this particular hex represents.
My assumption is that those maps will load into memory once each and each tile will be drawing a different section in concert. But I don't know.
The other approach would be to carve the map up into individual hexes (about 500, so for each state, we're looking at 1000 individual graphics. Smaller, sure, but 1000?)
So, how does Godot handle this? What's the best approach? Will each tile spawn copies of the huge, complete map? (1000 instances of a fairly large pair of graphical assets)
Or will all 500 hex instances share the same two assets?