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

Code compilation


When we make changes to our C# code, it is automatically compiled when we switch back from our favorite IDE (which is typically either MonoDevelop or the much more feature-rich Visual Studio) to the Unity Editor. However, the C# code is not converted directly into Machine Code, as we would expect static compilers to do if we are using languages such as C++.

Instead, the code is converted into an intermediate stage called Common Intermediate Language (CIL), which is an abstraction above Native Code. This is how .NET can support multiple languages--each uses a different compiler, but they're all converted into CIL, so the output is effectively the same regardless of the language that we pick. CIL is similar to Java bytecode, upon which it is based, and the CIL code is entirely useless on its own, as CPUs have no idea how to run the instructions defined in this language.

At runtime, this intermediate code is run through the Mono Virtual Machine (VM), which is an infrastructure...