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

Texture files


The terms texture and sprite often get confused in game development, so it's worth making the distinction--a texture is simply an image file, a big list of color data telling the interpreting program what color each pixel of the image should be, whereas a sprite is the 2D equivalent of a mesh, which is often just a single quad (a pair of triangles combined to make a rectangular mesh) that renders flat against the current Camera. There are also things called Sprite Sheets, which are large collections of individual images contained within a larger texture file, commonly used to contain the animations of a 2D character. These files can be split apart by tools, such as Unity's Sprite Atlas tool, to form individual textures for the character's animated frames.

Both meshes and sprites use textures to render an image onto its surface. Texture image files are typically generated in tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp and then imported into our project in much the same way as audio...