Unity 2017 Game Optimization, Second Edition

Master a series of performance-enhancing coding techniques and methods that help them improve the performance of their Unity3D applications

About This Book

• Discover features and techniques to optimize Unity Engine's CPU cycles, memory usage, and the GPU throughput of any application
• Explore multiple techniques to solve performance issues with your VR projects
• Learn the best practices for project organization to save time through an improved workflow

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 your 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 by 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 your scenes as dynamic as possible by making the most of the Physics engine
• Organize, filter, and compress your art assets to maximize performance while maintaining high quality
• Discover different kinds of performance problems that are critical for VR projects and how to tackle them
• Use the Mono Framework and C# 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

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.

Style and approach

This practical book will help readers understand the essentials of the Unity3D engine and how to build games while improving the performance of their applications.

Chris Dickinson grew up in a quiet little corner of England with a strong passion for mathematics, science and, in particular, video games. He loved playing them, dissecting their gameplay, and trying to figure out how they worked. Watching his dad hack the hex code of a PC game to get around the early days of copy protection completely blew his mind! His passion for science won the battle at the time; however, after completing a master's degree in physics with electronics, he flew out to California to work in the field of scientific research in the heart of Silicon Valley. Shortly afterward, he had to admit to himself that research work was an unsuitable career path for his temperament. After firing resumes in all directions, he landed a job that finally set him on the correct course in the field 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 his temperament much better. Now he was figuring out complex chains of devices, helping its developers fix and improve them, and building tools of his own. Chris learned a lot about how 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 games was flaring up again, pushing him to really figure out how video games were built. Once he felt confident enough, he returned to school for a bachelor's degree in game and simulation programming. By the time he was done, he was already hacking together his own (albeit rudimentary) game engines in C++ and regularly making use of those skills during his day job. However, if you want to build games, you should just build games, and not game engines. So, Chris picked his favorite publically available game engine at the time--an excellent 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 of that particular career path weren't for him, but the amount of knowledge he had accumulated in just a few short years was impressive by most standards, and he loved to make use of it in ways that enabled other developers with their creations. Since then, Chris has authored a tutorial book on game physics (Learning Game Physics with Bullet Physics and OpenGL, 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 works with 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 that focuses on delivering VR and AR experiences, such as 360 videos (and more!).

Outside of work, Chris continues to fight an addiction to board games (particularly Battlestar: Galactica and Blood Rage), an obsession with Blizzard's Overwatch and Starcraft II, cater to the ever-growing list of demands from a pair of grumpy yet adorable cats, and gazing forlornly at the latest versions of Unity with a bunch of game ideas floating around on paper. Someday soon, when the time is right (and when he stops slacking off), his plans may come to fruition.