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

Dynamic Batching


Dynamic Batching has the following three important qualities:

  • Batches are generated at runtime (batches are dynamically generated)
  • The objects that are contained within a batch can vary from one frame to the next, depending on what meshes are currently visible to the Main Camera view (batch contents are dynamic)
  • Even objects that can move around the Scene can be batched (it works on dynamic objects)

Hence, these attributes lead us to the name Dynamic Batching.

If we return to the Player Settings page and enable Dynamic Batching, we should see that the number of batches drops from 9 down to 6. Dynamic Batching automatically recognizes that our objects share Material and mesh information and is, therefore, combining some of them into a larger batch for processing.  We should also see a different list of items in the Frame Debugger, demonstrating that meshes are now being dynamically batched.

As we can see from the Frame Debugger, our four boxes have been combined into a single...