Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

This third edition of the Unity Virtual Reality (VR) development guide is updated to cover the latest features of Unity 2019.4 or later versions - the leading platform for building VR games, applications, and immersive experiences for contemporary VR devices. Enhanced with more focus on growing components, such as Universal Render Pipeline (URP), extended reality (XR) plugins, the XR Interaction Toolkit package, and the latest VR devices, this edition will help you to get up to date with the current state of VR. With its practical and project-based approach, this book covers the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You'll learn how to build VR apps that can be experienced with modern devices from Oculus, VIVE, and others. This virtual reality book presents lighting and rendering strategies to help you build cutting-edge graphics, and explains URP and rendering concepts that will enable you to achieve realism for your apps. You'll build real-world VR experiences using world space user interface canvases, locomotion and teleportation, 360-degree media, and timeline animation, as well as learn about important VR development concepts, best practices, and performance optimization and user experience strategies. By the end of this Unity book, you'll be fully equipped to use Unity to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Optimizing your code

Another area prone to performance problems and ripe for optimization is your C# script code. Throughout this book, we have used various coding best practices, without always explaining why. (On the other hand, some examples in this book are not necessarily efficient, in favor of simplicity and explanation). InChapter 9,Playing with Physics and Fire, for example, we implemented an object pool memory manager to avoid repeatedly instantiating and destroying game objects that cause memorygarbage collection(GC) issues, which, in turn, slows down your app.

In general, try to avoid code that repeats a lot of computation over and over. Try to pre-compute as much work as you can and store the partial results in variables. At some point, you may have to use a profiling tool to see how your code is performing under the hood. If the Profiler indicates that a large amount of time is spent in the scripts that you've written, you should consider another way...