Book Image

Unity 5 Game Optimization

By : Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity 5 Game Optimization

By: Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Competition within the gaming industry has become significantly fiercer in recent years with the adoption of game development frameworks such as Unity3D. 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 has led to an enormous explosion of talent, which has made it critical to ensure our games stand out from the crowd through a high level of quality. A good user experience is essential to create a solid product that our users will enjoy for many years to come. Nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience. Input latency, slow rendering, broken physics, stutters, freezes, and crashes are among a gamer's worst nightmares and it's up to us as game developers to ensure this never happens. High performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Initially, you will explore the major features of the Unity3D Engine from top to bottom, investigating a multitude of ways we can improve application performance starting with the detection and analysis of bottlenecks. You'll then gain an understanding of possible solutions and how to implement them. You will then learn everything you need to know about where performance bottlenecks can be found, why they happen, and how to work around them. This book gathers a massive wealth of knowledge together in one place, saving many hours of research and can be used as a quick reference to solve specific issues that arise during product development.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unity 5 Game Optimization
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Avoiding the Find() and SendMessage() methods 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 reasonable to call Find() during initialization of a Scene, such as Awake() and Start(), only for objects that already exists in the Scene. However, using either method for inter-object communication at runtime is likely to generate a very noticeable overhead.

Relying on Find() and SendMessage() type methods is typically symptomatic of poor design, inexperience in programming with C# and Unity, or just plain laziness during prototyping. Their usage has become something of an epidemic among beginner- and intermediate-level projects, such that Unity Technologies feels the need to...