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

Materials and Shaders


Shaders are short programs which define how the GPU should render incoming vertex and pixel data. A Shader on its own does not have the necessary knowledge of state to accomplish anything of value. It requires inputs such as diffuse textures, normal maps, colors, and so on, and must decide what Render State variables are required in order to complete its intended task.

Unity's Material system is essential to providing this information to our Shaders. Ultimately, this just means a Shader is dependent upon a Material in order to be used to render an object. Every Shader needs a Material, and every Material must have a Shader. Even newly imported meshes that are introduced into the Scene without any assigned Materials are automatically assigned a default (hidden) Material, which gives them a basic diffuse Shader and a white coloration. So, there is no way of getting around this relationship.

Note

A single Material can only support a single Shader. The use of multiple Shaders...