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 5. Faster Physics

Each of the performance-enhancing suggestions we've explored thus far have been primarily centered on reducing system requirements and avoiding frame rate issues. But at its most fundamental level, seeking peak performance means improving the user experience. This is because every frame rate hiccup, every crash, and every system requirement that is too costly for a given market ultimately detracts from the quality of the product, and leaves us wondering whether we should have tried harder to tweak settings and fix more bugs before release.

There are certainly opportunities to manipulate Physics Engine behavior that improve all of the aforementioned issues, but Physics Engines also fall into a unique category of having a direct impact on gameplay quality. If important gameplay collision events get missed (such as the player falling through the floor), or the game freezes while it calculates a complex situation, then these have a significant impact on gameplay quality...