Book Image

Unity 5 Game Optimization

By : Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity 5 Game Optimization

By: Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Competition within the gaming industry has become significantly fiercer in recent years with the adoption of game development frameworks such as Unity3D. Through its massive feature-set and ease-of-use, Unity helps put some of the best processing and rendering technology in the hands of hobbyists and professionals alike. This has led to an enormous explosion of talent, which has made it critical to ensure our games stand out from the crowd through a high level of quality. A good user experience is essential to create a solid product that our users will enjoy for many years to come. Nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience. Input latency, slow rendering, broken physics, stutters, freezes, and crashes are among a gamer's worst nightmares and it's up to us as game developers to ensure this never happens. High performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Initially, you will explore the major features of the Unity3D Engine from top to bottom, investigating a multitude of ways we can improve application performance starting with the detection and analysis of bottlenecks. You'll then gain an understanding of possible solutions and how to implement them. You will then learn everything you need to know about where performance bottlenecks can be found, why they happen, and how to work around them. This book gathers a massive wealth of knowledge together in one place, saving many hours of research and can be used as a quick reference to solve specific issues that arise during product development.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unity 5 Game Optimization
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Consider using distance-squared over distance


It is safe to say that CPUs are relatively good at multiplying floating-point numbers together, but relatively dreadful at calculating square roots from them. Every time we ask a Vector3 to calculate a distance with the magnitude property or with the Distance() method, we're asking it to perform a square root calculation (as per the Pythagorean theorem), which can cost a lot of CPU overhead compared to many other types of vector math calculations.

However, the Vector3 class also offers a sqrMagnitude property, which is the same as distance, only squared. This lets us perform essentially the same comparison check without the expensive square root included, so long as we also square the value we're trying to compare it against; or, to describe this mathematically, if the magnitude of A is less than the magnitude of B, then A2 will be less than B2.

For example, consider code like the following:

float distance = (transform.position – other.transform...