Unity 5 Game Optimization

Master performance optimization for Unity3D applications with tips and techniques that cover every aspect of the Unity3D Engine

About This Book

• Optimize CPU cycles, memory usage, and GPU throughput for any Unity3D application
• Master optimization techniques across all Unity Engine features including Scripting, Asset Management, Physics, Graphics Features, and Shaders
• A practical guide to exploring Unity Engine s many performance-enhancing methods

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for intermediate and advanced Unity developers who have experience with most of Unity s feature-set, and who want to maximize the performance of their game. Familiarity with the C# language will be needed.

What You Will Learn

• Use the Unity Profiler to find bottlenecks anywhere in our application, and discover how to resolve them
• Implement best-practices for C# scripting to avoid common pitfalls
• Develop a solid understanding of the rendering pipeline, and maximize its performance through reducing draw calls and avoiding fill rate bottlenecks
• Enhance shaders in a way that is accessible to most developers, optimizing them through subtle yet effective performance tweaks
• Keep our scenes as dynamic as possible by making the most of the Physics engine
• Organize, filter, and compress our art assets to maximize performance while maintaining high quality
• Pull back the veil on the Mono Framework and the C# Language to implement low-level enhancements that maximize memory usage and avoid garbage collection
• Get to know the best practices for project organization to save time through an improved workflow

In Detail

Competition within the gaming industry has become significantly fiercer in recent years with the adoption of game development frameworks such as Unity3D. 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 has led to an enormous explosion of talent, which has made it critical to ensure our games stand out from the crowd through a high level of quality. A good user experience is essential to create a solid product that our users will enjoy for many years to come.

Nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience. Input latency, slow rendering, broken physics, stutters, freezes, and crashes are among a gamer s worst nightmares and it s up to us as game developers to ensure this never happens. High performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets.

Initially, you will explore the major features of the Unity3D Engine from top to bottom, investigating a multitude of ways we can improve application performance starting with the detection and analysis of bottlenecks. You ll then gain an understanding of possible solutions and how to implement them. You will then learn everything you need to know about where performance bottlenecks can be found, why they happen, and how to work around them.

This book gathers a massive wealth of knowledge together in one place, saving many hours of research and can be used as a quick reference to solve specific issues that arise during product development.

Chris Dickinson grew up in a quiet little corner of England with a strong passion formathematics, science and, in particular, video games. He loved playing them, dissectingtheir gameplay, and trying to figure out how they worked. Watching his dad hack the hexcode of a PC game to get around the early days of copy protection completely blew hismind! His passion for science won the battle at the time; however, after completing amaster's degree in physics with electronics, he flew out to California to work in the field ofscientific research in the heart of Silicon Valley. Shortly afterward, he had to admit tohimself that research work was an unsuitable career path for his temperament. After firingresumes in all directions, he landed a job that finally set him on the correct course in thefield of software engineering (this is not uncommon for physics grads, I hear).His time working as an automated tools developer for IPBX phone systems fit histemperament much better. Now he was figuring out complex chains of devices, helping itsdevelopers fix and improve them, and building tools of his own. Chris learned a lot abouthow to work with big, complex, real-time, event-based, user-input driven state machines(sounds familiar?). Being mostly self-taught at this point, Chris's passion for video gameswas flaring up again, pushing him to really figure out how video games were built. Once hefelt confident enough, he returned to school for a bachelor's degree in game and simulationprogramming. By the time he was done, he was already hacking together his own (albeitrudimentary) game engines in C++ and regularly making use of those skills during his dayjob. However, if you want to build games, you should just build games, and not gameengines. So, Chris picked his favorite publically available game engine at the time--anexcellent little tool called Unity 3D--and started hammering out some games.After a brief stint of indie game development, Chris regretfully decided that the demands ofthat particular career path weren't for him, but the amount of knowledge he hadaccumulated in just a few short years was impressive by most standards, and he loved tomake use of it in ways that enabled other developers with their creations. Since then, Chrishas authored a tutorial book on game physics (Learning Game Physics with Bullet Physics andOpenGL, Packt Publishing) and two editions of a Unity performance optimization book(which you are currently reading). He has married the love of his life, Jamie, and workswith some of the coolest modern technology as a software development engineer in Test(SDET) at Jaunt Inc. in San Mateo, CA, a Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality startup thatfocuses on delivering VR and AR experiences, such as 360 videos (and more!).Outside of work, Chris continues to fight an addiction to board games (particularlyBattlestar