Chapter 1, Detecting Performance Issues, provides an exploration of the Unity Profiler and a series of methods to profile our application, detect performance bottlenecks, and perform root cause analysis.

Chapter 2, Scripting Strategies, deals with the best practices for our Unity C# Script code, minimizing Component overhead, improving inter-object communication, and more.

Chapter 3, The Benefits of Batching, explores Unity's Dynamic and Static Batching systems to ease the burden on the rendering system.

Chapter 4, Kickstart Your Art, helps you understand the underlying technology behind our art assets and learn how to avoid common pitfalls with importing, compression, and encoding.

Chapter 5, Faster Physics, is about investigating the nuances of Unity's physics system for both 3D and 2D games, and how to properly organize our physics objects for improved performance.

Chapter 6, Dynamic Graphics, provides an in-depth exploration of the rendering system, and how to improve applications that suffer rendering bottlenecks in the GPU, or CPU, and specialized techniques for mobile devices.

Chapter 7, Masterful Memory Management, examines the inner workings of the Unity Engine, the Mono Framework, and how memory is managed within these components to protect our application from heap allocations and runtime garbage collection.

Chapter 8, Tactical Tips and Tricks, deals with a multitude of useful techniques used by professionals to improve project workflow and scene management.

The majority of this book will focus on features within the context of Unity version 5.x. Most of the techniques can be applied to Unity 4.x projects, but may require an upgrade to Unity 4 Pro Edition in order to access some of them (such as Occlusion Culling, Static Batching, and even the Profiler itself).

This book is intended for intermediate and advanced Unity developers who have experience with most of Unity's feature set, and those who want to maximize the performance of their game or solve particular bottlenecks. Whether the bottleneck is caused by CPU overload, runtime spiking, slow memory access, fragmentation, garbage collection, poor GPU fillrate, or memory bandwidth, this book will teach you the techniques you need to identify the source of the problem and help explore multiple ways of reducing their impact on your application.

Familiarity with the C# language will be needed for sections involving scripting and memory usage, and a basic understanding of cg will be needed for areas involving Shader optimization.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The main Unity callback for application updates is the Update() function."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class TestComponent : MonoBehaviour {
    void Update() {
        if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space)) {
            PerformProfilingTest();
        }
    }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

public class TestComponent : MonoBehaviour {
    void Update() {
        if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space)) {
            PerformProfilingTest();
        }
    }
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The threshold value for the sleeping state can be modified under Edit | Project Settings | Physics | Sleep Threshold."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.