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 8. Masterful Memory Management

Memory efficiency is an important element of performance optimization. It's possible for games of limited scope, such as hobby projects and prototypes, to get away with ignoring memory management; they will tend to waste a lot of resources, and potentially leak memory, but this won't be a problem if we limit its exposure to friends and coworkers. However, anything we want to release professionally needs to take this subject seriously. Unnecessary memory allocations lead to poor user experience due to excessive garbage collection (costing precious CPU time), and memory leaks which will lead to crashes. None of these situations are acceptable in modern game releases.

Using memory efficiently with Unity requires a solid understanding of the underlying Unity Engine, Mono platform, the C# language. Also, if we're making use of the new IL2CPP scripting backend then it would be wise to become familiar with its inner workings. This can be a bit of an intimidating...