LibVT is a library implementing "virtual texturing". LibVT itself is written in C++ but exposes a C-based API.
Download a Demo App Binary for Win/Mac to test out LibVT:
(The demo also contains a free 32k^2 virtual texture dataset which you can use for for testing your LibVT project)
The theory behind LibVT: Virtual Texturing Thesis
**Features: **
- NEW: LibVT is now completely MIT-licensed
- Implements "virtual texturing" in the style of Sean Barrett and John Carmack
- Using OpenGL with shaders in GLSL or Cg.
- Designed as a library to allow easy integration into existing rendering engines (e.g., OpenSceneGraph integration has been done).
- Compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0 and support for iOS (iPhone / iPad).
- Tile determination in view space using a read-back.
- Support for bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic filtering.
- Configurability of physical texture dimension, RAM-cache size, tile border, tile- size, virtual texture size, resident mipmap-levels, cache warming, etc.
- Mipmap-chain length of up to 11, allowing a virtual texture resolution of 256k^2 with 256^2 pixel tiles.
- Multiple tile decompression libraries: LibPNG, LibJPEG, LibJPEG-Turbo, STBI , ImageMagick and CoreGraphics.
- Usage of compressed(JPEG,PNG,etc), uncompressed or DXT1/5 pre-compressed tiles.
- Multithreaded and decoupled tile streaming using boost::thread and with optional real-time DXT compression using FastDXT.
- All texture transfers (read-back, pagetable texture and physical texture) optionally asynchronous using PBOs.
- Either stores fallback entries in the pagetable texture or uses looping in the frag- ment shader.
- Optional dynamic adjustment of the LoD bias to fit visible tiles into the physical texture.
- LibVT also includes a pipeline for generating virtual textures out of individual texture files: generateTextureAtlas, generateVirtualTextureTiles, mergeVirtualTextureTiles, convertVirtualTextureTiles, offsetObjTexcoords