   Tile Patches
  alright working on my 2d tile engine I'm planning on doing a patches of like 10x10 tiles the tiles are going to be 16x16 pixel or 32x32 tiles multi-layered with objects displayed between the layers. should i consider larger patches or smaller patches of tiles for my batch draws.some objects will be animated so i was also planning on using patch size to help determine whether i needed to update patches.is there any size of patches i should consider to large or to small also secondary suggestions on pixel/tile style editors 
  The short answer is batch anywhere you can. If you cant batch things together, then you cant.   ;  Patching in that way isn't really going to produce optimal draw calls -- usually, the big killer is switching materials (textures and shaders, basically). The better strategery is to, first, determine what subset of the world to render (a simply check between camera coordinates and world coordinates will do, through something like a quad-tree or graph of small sections of the world might be better.) then draw everything with one material first, then the next, and so on. There are tons of resources about how to optimally sort based on material, google can help you.In my system I use small sections of the map, what you call "patches", not to determine rendering order, but to enable me to stream the world from disk. I find that 4x4 or 16x16 sections work nicely -- since they are a power of two they fit in nicely with a quad-tree scheme, and have some other nice properties, such as easily telling which section an item is in given its world-space coordinates with simple binary arithmetic.   