Book Image

Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

By : Dr. Davide Aversa, Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

By: Dr. Davide Aversa, Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Unity engine comes with a great set of features to help you build high-performance games. This Unity book is your guide to optimizing various aspects of your game development, from game characters and scripts, right through to animations. You’ll explore techniques for writing better game scripts and learn how to optimize a game using Unity technologies such as ECS and the Burst compiler. The book will also help you manage third-party tooling used with the Unity ecosystem. You’ll also focus on the problems in the performance of large games and virtual reality (VR) projects in Unity, gaining insights into detecting performance issues and performing root cause analysis. As you progress, you’ll discover best practices for your Unity C# script code and get to grips with usage patterns. Later, you’ll be able to optimize audio resources and texture files, along with effectively storing and using resource files. You’ll then delve into the Rendering Pipeline and learn how to identify performance problems in the pipeline. In addition to this, you’ll learn how to optimize the memory and processing unit of Unity. Finally, you’ll cover tips and tricks used by Unity professionals to improve the project workflow. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to build interactive games using Unity and its components.

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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Base Scripting Optimization
Section 1: Base Scripting Optimization
2
Evaluating Performance Problems
Evaluating Performance Problems
Gathering profiling data using the Unity Profiler
Best approaches to performance analysis
Final thoughts on profiling and analysis
Summary
3
Scripting Strategies
Scripting Strategies
Obtaining components using the fastest method
Removing empty callback definitions
Caching component references
Sharing calculation output
Update, coroutines, and InvokeRepeating
Faster GameObject null reference checks
Avoid retrieving string properties from GameObjects
Using appropriate data structures
Avoiding re-parenting transforms at runtime
Considering caching transform changes
Avoiding Find() and SendMessage() at runtime
Disabling unused scripts and objects
Using distance-squared over distance
Minimizing deserialization behavior
Loading scenes additively and asynchronously
Creating a custom Update() layer
Summary
4
Section 2: Graphical Optimizations
Section 2: Graphical Optimizations
5
The Benefits of Batching
The Benefits of Batching
Draw calls
Materials and shaders
The Frame Debugger
Dynamic batching
Static batching
Summary
6
Optimizing Your Art Assets
Optimizing Your Art Assets
Audio
Texture files
Mesh and animation files
Asset bundles and resources
Summary
7
Faster Physics
Faster Physics
Understanding the physics engine
Physics performance optimizations
Summary
8
Dynamic Graphics
Dynamic Graphics
Exploring the Rendering Pipeline
Detecting performance issues
Rendering performance enhancements
Summary
9
Section 3: Advance Optimizations
Section 3: Advance Optimizations
10
Optimizations for Virtual and Augmented Reality
Optimizations for Virtual and Augmented Reality
Overview of XR technology
Developing XR products
Performance enhancements in XR
Summary
11
Masterful Memory Management
Masterful Memory Management
The Mono platform
Code compilation
Profiling memory
Memory management performance enhancements
Summary
12
The Data-Oriented Technology Stack
The Data-Oriented Technology Stack
The problem of multithreading
The Unity Job System
The new ECS
The burst compiler
Summary
13
Tactical Tips and Tricks
Tactical Tips and Tricks
Editor hotkey tips
Editor UI tips
Scripting tips
Custom Editor scripts and menu tips
External tips
Other tips
Summary
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
Other Books You May Enjoy
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The new ECS

The ECS is a brave and ambitious attempt to redesign the core foundation of Unity's design: the GameObject-MonoBehaviour paradigm. As you can imagine, changing the base design pattern of every object in the game is not an easy task. So you may ask: Why?

There are several reasons for that. Let's look at some of them objectively:

  • First, as we said before, GameObject and MonoBehaviour are heavy objects; they carry a lot of internal code and data structures. The overhead introduced by GameObject instances and MonoBehaviour is large enough to limit the number of objects you can have on the screen more than the resources needed to render them. That's not a good thing for an abstraction model.
  • Second, MonoBehaviour instances are scattered in memory. This means that GameObject needs to look around in memory to retrieve all the MonoBehaviour instances it is...
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