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

About the Reviewers

Luiz Henrique Bueno is a certified ScrumMaster® (CSM) and Unity Certified Developer with over 29 years of experience in software development. He has experimented with the evolution of languages, editors, databases, and frameworks.

In 2002, he wrote the book Web Applications with Visual Studio .NET, ASP.NET, and C#, at the launch of Visual Studio .NET. He also participated in the development of a Brazilian magazine called Casa Conectada, about Home Automation.

Based on this magazine's project, he started the development of projects focused on the same subject. He has used technologies such as Crestron, Control4, Marantz, Windows Mobile, and Symbian OS, always implementing touchscreen applications.

Since 2010, he has been developing apps and video games for mobile devices, including VR/AR applications. He has already developed many projects for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Android using Unity, C#, Xcode, Cocoa Touch, Core Data, SpriteKit, SceneKit, Objective-C, Swift, Git, Photoshop, and Maya.

His motto is "Do not write code for QA, write code for Production." You can reach Luiz Henrique Bueno on his personal website.

Dr. Sebastian Thomas Koenig received his Ph.D. in human interface technology from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, developing a framework for personalized virtual reality cognitive rehabilitation. He obtained his diploma in psychology from the University of Regensburg, Germany, in the areas of experimental psychology, clinical neuropsychology, and virtual reality rehabilitation.

Dr. Koenig is the founder and CEO of Katana Simulations, where he oversees the design, development, and evaluation of cognitive assessment and training simulations. His professional experience spans over 10 years of clinical work in cognitive rehabilitation and virtual reality research, development, and human computer interaction. He has been awarded over $2 million in research funding in the USA, Germany, and Australia as principal investigator and industry partner. He has extensive experience as a speaker at international conferences and as a reviewer of scientific publications in the areas of rehabilitation, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, software engineering, game development, games user research, and virtual reality.

Dr. Koenig has developed numerous software applications for cognitive assessment and training. For his work on virtual memory tasks, he was awarded the prestigious Laval Virtual Award in 2011 in the Medicine and Health category. Other applications include the Wonderworks Virtual Reality Attention Training in collaboration with the Kessler Foundation, NJ, USA, and the patent-pending Microsoft Kinect-based motor and cognitive training JewelMine/Mystic Isle at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, CA, USA. Dr. Koenig was awarded the Early Career Investigator Award (2nd place) by the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation in 2016.