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

Memory usage optimization


In most game engines, we would have the luxury of being able to port inefficient script code into the faster C++ area if we were hitting performance issues. This is not an option unless we invest serious cash in obtaining the Unity source code, which is offered as a license separate from the Free/Personal/Pro licensing system, and on a per case, per title basis. This forces the overwhelming majority of us into a position of needing to make our C# script-level code as performant as possible. So, what does all of this backstory we've been covering mean for us when it comes to the task of performance optimization?

Firstly, we won't be covering anything that is specific to the UnityScript and Boo languages (although much of the knowledge translates to those languages).

Secondly, even though all of our script code might be in C#, we need to be aware that the overall Unity Engine is built from multiple components that each maintains its own memory domains.

Thirdly, only...