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

Materials and Shaders


Render State in Unity is essentially exposed to us via Materials. Materials are a container around Shaders, short programs that define how the GPU should render incoming vertex and texture data. A Shader on its own does not have the necessary knowledge of state to accomplish anything of value. A Shader requires inputs such as diffuse textures, Normal maps, and lighting information and effectively dictates what Render State variables need to be set in order to render the incoming data.

Note

Shaders are named this way because their original implementation many years ago was to only handle lighting and shading of an object (applying shadows, where originally there were none). Their purpose has grown enormously since then, and now they have a much more generic purpose of being a programmable access point to many different kinds of parallel tasks, but the old name still remains.

Every Shader needs a Material, and every Material must have a Shader. Even newly imported meshes...