Book Image

Unity 2017 Game Optimization - Second Edition

By : Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity 2017 Game Optimization - Second Edition

By: Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Unity is an awesome game development engine. 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 book shows you how to make your games fly with the recent version of Unity 2017, and demonstrates that high performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Since nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience, the book starts by explaining how to use the Unity Profiler to detect problems. You will learn how to use stopwatches, timers and logging methods to diagnose the problem. You will then explore techniques to improve performance through better programming practices. Moving on, you will then learn about Unity’s built-in batching processes; when they can be used to improve performance, and their limitations. Next, you will import your art assets using minimal space, CPU and memory at runtime, and discover some underused features and approaches for managing asset data. You will also improve graphics, particle system and shader performance with a series of tips and tricks to make the most of GPU parallel processing. You will then delve into the fundamental layers of the Unity3D engine to discuss some issues that may be difficult to understand without a strong knowledge of its inner-workings. The book also introduces you to the critical performance problems for VR projects and how to tackle them. By the end of the book, you will have learned to improve the development workflow by properly organizing assets and ways to instantiate assets as quickly and waste-free as possible via object pooling.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Software and Hardware List
Preface

Avoid Find() and SendMessage() at runtime


The SendMessage() method and family of GameObject.Find() methods are notoriously expensive and should be avoided at all costs. The SendMessage() method is about 2,000 times slower than a simple function call, and the cost of the Find() method scales very poorly with Scene complexity since it must iterate through every GameObject in the Scene. It is sometimes forgivable to call Find() during initialization of a Scene, such as during an Awake() or Start() callback. Even in this case, it should only be used to acquire objects that we know for certain already exist in the Scene and for scenes that have only a handful of GameObjects in them. Regardless, using either of these methods for interobject communication at runtime is likely to generate a very noticeable overhead and potentially dropped frames.

Relying on Find() and SendMessage() is typically symptomatic of poor design, inexperience in programming with C# and Unity, or just plain laziness during...