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

Chapter 3. The Benefits of Batching

In 3D graphics and games, batching is a very general term describing the process of grouping a large number of wayward pieces of data and processing them together as a single, large block of data. The goal of this process is to reduce computation time, often by exploiting parallel processing or reducing overhead costs, if the entire batch is treated as individual elements. In some cases, the act of batching centers around meshes, large sets of vertices, edges, UV coordinates, and so on, which are used to represent a 3D object. However, the term could just as easily refer to the act of batching audio files, sprites, and texture files (also known as Atlasing), and other large datasets.

So, just to clear up any confusion, when the topic of batching is mentioned in Unity, it is usually referring to the two primary mechanisms it offers for batching mesh files: Static and Dynamic Batching. These methods are essentially a form of geometry instancing, where we...