Unity 2017 Game Optimization

By : Dickinson

5 (1)

Buy this Book

Unity 2017 Game Optimization

5 (1)

By: Dickinson

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Pursuing Performance Problems

The Unity Profiler

Best approaches to performance analysis

Final thoughts on Profiling and Analysis

Summary

Scripting Strategies

Obtain Components using the fastest method

Remove empty callback definitions

Cache Component references

Share calculation output

Update, Coroutines, and InvokeRepeating

Faster GameObject null reference checks

Avoid retrieving string properties from GameObjects

Use appropriate data structures

Avoid re-parenting Transforms at runtime

Consider caching Transform changes

Avoid Find() and SendMessage() at runtime

Disable unused scripts and objects

Consider using distance-squared over distance

Minimize Deserialization behavior

Load scenes additively and asynchronously

Create a custom Update() layer

Summary

The Benefits of Batching

Draw Calls

Materials and Shaders

The Frame Debugger

Dynamic Batching

Static Batching

Summary

Kickstart Your Art

Audio

Texture files

Mesh and animation files

Asset Bundles and Resources

Summary

Faster Physics

Physics Engine internals

Physics performance optimizations

Summary

Dynamic Graphics

The Rendering Pipeline

Detecting performance issues

Rendering performance enhancements

Summary

Virtual Velocity and Augmented Acceleration

XR Development

Performance enhancements

Summary

Masterful Memory Management

The Mono platform

Code compilation

Profiling memory

Memory management performance enhancements

The future of Unity, Mono, and IL2CPP

Summary

Tactical Tips and Tricks

Editor hotkey tips

Editor UI tips

Scripting tips

Custom Editor scripts and menu tips

External tips

Summary

Customer Reviews

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External tips

The following tips and tricks relate to topics outside the Unity Editor itself that can help Unity development workflow enormously.

The Twitter hashtag #unitytips is a great resource for useful tips and tricks for Unity development and is, in fact, where many of the tips in this chapter originate from. However, hashtags are difficult to filter for tips you haven't seen before, and it tends to be abused for marketing. A great resource that pulls together a bundle of weekly tips from #unitytips can be found at http://devdog.io/blog.

Googling Unity-related problems or concerns can go a lot faster if we start the search with site:unity3d.com, which will filter all results so that only those under the unity3d.com domain will appear.

If the Unity Editor crashes, for whatever reason, then we can potentially restore our Scene by renaming the following file to include...