Identifying Issues

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Performance Optimization in Unity

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Unity

Performance Optimization in Unity

10 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Unity Expert Gameplay Programmer Certification Preparation

Welcome to Performance Optimization in Unity, the fourth course in Unity's Gameplay Programming Specialization! This course is exam preparation for Unity's Expert Gameplay Programmer Certification Exam. This course will challenge you with a series of realistic programming problems in Unity video-game projects, inspired by one or more of the topics covered in the Expert Gameplay Programmer Exam. Throughout this course, you will learn various optimization techniques, including: optimizing for different platforms, understanding how platform differences can impact gameplay, using Asset Bundle configuration tools, gameplay debugging, and rendering optimization. By the end of this course, you will optimize a 3D "Dual-Stick Survivor" game project for WebGL. This is an advanced-level course, intended for industry game developers or very experienced Unity enthusiasts who are looking to “level-up” their gameplay programming and implementation strategies. To succeed in this courses, you should have at least 2-3 years of experience developing games with Unity. You should be familiar with the full-game lifecycle (working from early concept to launch), creating and working with Prefabs, understanding game asset and animation pipelines, and have some experience with Unity Services. You should also have advanced programming skills, particularly in the C# language.

From the lesson

Asset Bundles

Long gone are the days of games released and considered final. DLC has expanded the life expectancy of games, some even into decade-long legacies. Other games have found great success in offer customizations that can be downloaded. The rise in mobile gaming has seen DLC as a means on minimizing wait times for players. Unity’s Asset Bundles provide a solution to all these situations, and more for the clever programmer. This week you’ll be determining the optimal configurations to support efficient Asset Bundle integration with your game. You’ll need to analyze needs and issues to determine the best package sizes and methods, and determine the solutions required.

Identifying Issues3:17

Providing Asset Bundle Solutions3:41

Using Asset Bundles3:44

Meet the Instructors

Unity Technologies
Dustin Carroll
Senior Technical Artist & Adjunct Instructor
Computing & Digital Media

When creating asset bundles,

you have the option to compress the files.

Now, there's a pro and con to compressing,

and there's a couple different ways that you can compress.

So, let's have a look at that.

Now, if I go over to the Build tab,

under Advanced settings, I have a option for compression.

The options are; no compression,

standard compression or LZMA,

and chunk based compression or LZ4.

Understanding the pros and cons to compressing,

and the different compressing methods is going to be integral if you want to optimize

your game to be downloaded and played across a variety of devices.

The uncompressed asset bundle setting is obviously the largest but it's also the fastest.

The processor doesn't have to do anything to make the files accessible to your game.

The next largest is the LZ4 setting.

Now, this is larger than the LZMA but it does have a large advantage to it.

LZ4 can have aspects of it or

individual files taken out without processing the entire file.

This means taken out a single asset can be faster and also uses up a lot less memory.

Now, the smallest compression method is LZMA but that also means it's the slowest.

The entire asset needs to be loaded in the memory

and decompress before any asset within it can be accessed.

Now, either of the compressions can also have small complications.

Particularly in Android, if a asset bundles included in the Apk,

it's obviously stored in the Apk.

This must be decompress before it can be even accessed.

Compressing asset bundles does take longer to build but you get

a smaller install if you include those files with the initial distribution of the game.

You get a bigger install and a faster build if you are not compressing.

Now, if memory is a concern,

the uncompressed and the LZ4 for compression method takes up less memory.

Uncompressed and LZ4 take up very little memory to access,

LZ4 in particular doesn't have very much memory overhead because you're able to access

the individual portions of the asset bundle without having to uncompress all of it.

Now, of course, compression is better for downloading smaller file sizes

mean less time the player's spent downloading and more time playing the game.

Something to be aware of,

if you're creating a WebGL project,

do watch how about compressing your asset bundles.

WebGL does any decompression on the main thread,

which means you're gonna be taking performance away from

a game-play if you're trying to load something asynchronously.

Finally, if you're developing your game for WebGL,

do watch out and don't compress your asset bundle files.

WebGL can only decompress using the main thread,

it can't use worker threads.

This means that you might suffer a performance impact if you're loading your files

asynchronously and trying to let the player play the game at the same time.

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