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

Audio


Unity, as a framework, can be used to build anything from small applications that require only a handful of sound effects and a single background track to huge role playing games that need millions of lines of spoken dialog, music tracks, and ambient sound effects. Regardless of the actual scope of the application, audio files are often a large contributor to the application size after it is built (sometimes called its disk footprint). Moreover, many developers are surprised to find that runtime audio processing can turn into a significant source of CPU and memory consumption.

Audio is often neglected on both sides of the gaming industry; developers tend not to commit many resources to it until the last minute, whereas users rarely draw their attention to it. Nobody notices when audio is handled well, but we all know what bad audio sounds like--it's instantly recognizable, jarring, and guaranteed to draw unwanted attention. This makes it crucial not to sacrifice too much audio clarity...