Mesh tilemap and scrolling

Question

I'm working on a top-down game where the player can move up, down, left, or right. I've come across tilemaps but since using Unity, I'm seeing the idea of using Meshes. I don't quite understand how this works. Is it one mesh (two triangles) per tile? If I want to perform scrolling, is it a case of simply swapping out the UV values per vertex?

In theory, could I get an infinite landscape scrolling by creating one large mesh and simply swap out UV coordinates in realtime or am I misunderstanding the uses of Meshes and UV coordinates on the texture atlas?

Thanks

Answer 1

if you want to scroll uv`s , you can do it by changing the texture offset in Update method , it can be used for background of a 2d game

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class ScrollingUVs : MonoBehaviour 
{
    public int materialIndex = 0;
    public Vector2 uvAnimationRate = new Vector2( 1.0f, 0.0f );
    public string textureName = "_MainTex";

    Vector2 uvOffset = Vector2.zero;

    void LateUpdate() 
    {
        uvOffset += ( uvAnimationRate * Time.deltaTime );
        if( renderer.enabled )
        {
            renderer.materials[ materialIndex ].SetTextureOffset( textureName, uvOffset );
        }
    }
}

and you can use object scrolling when you want to move an object in plane and when it reaches one end it appears in its initial position like a loop

public class ScrollingObj : MonoBehaviour 
{
    float speed ;  
    float resetDistance;  
    float initialDistance;  
    boolean isVertical;  

     void Start()
    {
      isVertical=false;
    }


        void Update ()  
        {  
            float move = speed * Time.deltaTime;  
            if (isVertical) {  
                transform.Translate(Vector3.down * move, Space.World);  
                if (transform.position.y < resetDistance)  
                {  
                    transform.position = Vector3(transform.position.x, initialDistance, transform.position.z);  
                }  
            }else{  
                transform.Translate(Vector3.left * move, Space.World);  
                if (transform.position.x < resetDistance)  
                {  
                    transform.position = Vector3(initialDistance, transform.position.y, transform.position.z);  
                }  
            }  
        }  
}