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

Physics Engine internals


Unity technically features two different Physics Engines: Nvidia PhysX for 3D physics and the Open Source project Box2D for 2D physics. However, their implementation is highly abstracted, and from the perspective of the Unity API, both engines operate in a nearly identical fashion.

In either case, the more we understand about Unity's Physics System, the more sense we can make of possible performance enhancements. So, first we'll cover some theory about Unity's Physics Engines.

Physics and time

Physics Engines generally operate under the assumption that time is iterating in fixed values of time, and both of Unity's Physics Engines operate in this manner. The Physics Engine will only calculate using very specific values of time, independent of how much time it took to render the previous frame. This is known as the Fixed Update Timestep, and it is set to a value of 20 milliseconds by default, or 50 updates per second.

Note

It can be very difficult to generate consistent...