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

Chapter 4. Kickstart Your Art

Art is a very subjective area, dominated by personal opinion and preference. It can be difficult to say whether, and why, one piece of art is better than the other, and it's likely that we won't be able to find complete consensus on our opinions. The technical aspects behind art assets that support a game's artistry can also be very subjective. There are multiple workarounds that can be implemented to improve performance, but these tend to result in a loss of quality for the sake of speed. If we're trying to reach peak performance then it's important that we consult with our team members whenever we decide to make any changes to our art assets, as it is primarily a balancing act, which can be an art form in itself.

Whether we're trying to minimize our runtime memory footprint, keeping the smallest possible executable size, maximizing loading speed, or maintaining consistency in frame rate, there are plenty of options to explore. There are some methods that are...