I agree. Also as you scroll the view of the game world you should be progressively uploading the `tile` sections which are about to come into view - rather than upload a whole horizontal and/or vertical strip of tiles all in one frame you should spread the upload out over the number of frames it takes before they become visible, so that with slower scrolling you upload less frequently and faster scrolling it adapts to the scroll speed. Then you are only uploading a few tiles per frame, and by the time you've scrolled say 64 pixels and are ready to see the newly uploaded tiles coming into view, you might've taken 16 frames to upload them, which is better than creating a sudden jerk due to a mass upload.
I also recommend keeping a fairly decent sized `extra` number of tiles in video ram that have been `used recently`, which are further away from the current camera view but which were perhaps uploaded not long ago. While you're still within a given megabyte limit, you can just let the uploaded tiles accumulate into new image sections so that when you change scroll direction and go back where you just came from you don't have to start uploading new stuff. OR, you could start uploading new stuff but at the far outer edges of the parts which are cached, meaning you have much more time to upload them before you need to start worrying about not having time to get them all updated.
Also you have to ask yourself how much of your landscape will likely get modified and how much of it will likely stay unchanged. If there are only going to be a few modifications then the unmodified areas could use repeating textures versus per-pixel state.
I also recommend keeping a fairly decent sized `extra` number of tiles in video ram that have been `used recently`, which are further away from the current camera view but which were perhaps uploaded not long ago. While you're still within a given megabyte limit, you can just let the uploaded tiles accumulate into new image sections so that when you change scroll direction and go back where you just came from you don't have to start uploading new stuff. OR, you could start uploading new stuff but at the far outer edges of the parts which are cached, meaning you have much more time to upload them before you need to start worrying about not having time to get them all updated.
Also you have to ask yourself how much of your landscape will likely get modified and how much of it will likely stay unchanged. If there are only going to be a few modifications then the unmodified areas could use repeating textures versus per-pixel state.