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

Remove empty callback definitions


The primary means of scripting in Unity is to write callback functions in classes derived from MonoBehaviour, which we know Unity will call when necessary. Perhaps the four most commonly used callbacks are Awake(), Start(), Update(), and FixedUpdate().

Awake() is called the moment a MonoBehaviour is first created, whether this occurs during Scene initialization or when a new GameObject containing the MonoBehaviour is instantiated at runtime from a Prefab. Start() will be called shortly after Awake() but before its first Update(). During Scene initialization, every MonoBehaviour Component's Awake() callback will be called before any of their Start() callbacks are.

After this, Update() will be called repeatedly, each time the Rendering Pipeline presents a new image. Update() will continue to be called provided the MonoBehaviour is still present in the Scene, it is still enabled, and its parent GameObject is active.

Finally, FixedUpdate() is called just prior...