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

Texture files


The terms "Texture" and "Sprite" often get confused in game development, so it's worth making the distinction that in Unity 3D a Texture is simply an image file; a big list of color data telling the interpreting program what color each pixel of the image should be. Whereas a Sprite is the 2D equivalent of a mesh, which just happens to be a single quad that renders flat against the current camera. There are also things called Sprite Sheets, which are large collections of individual images contained within a larger Texture file, commonly used to contain the animations of a 2D character. These files can be split apart by Unity's Sprite Batch tool, to form individual Textures for the animation frames.

Let's try to ignore all of these confusing naming convention overlaps, and simply talk about Textures: the image files we're importing into our application that were generated in tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp. At runtime, these files are loaded into memory, pushed to the GPU...