I wanna to achieve an effect like a fired blue ball (ball with energy) before to shoot it on the sky. I thought to use some particle systems but a friend of mine said that it's very expensive for the memory to use particle system. Is there a different way to achieve this ? Where can I find some examples ?
Particle Systems are probably the best way and can achieve some really nice looking effects.
It depends how optimized your particle system is, but my game used a ton and it ran fast and smooth (this was with OpenGL ES).
Generally they're fine if you keep the max particles as low as possible (whilst still looking good).
Thanks to an open source engine (cocos2d iphone) I also got all my particle systems to render in the same OpenGL call.
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thank you so much for all the fast responses I truly appreciate it. I have another question I've been wondering about, so I am working mobile game and I want to keep the size as small as possible. So I wanted to know does using Unity particle effects, impact performance and game size? I was wondering, if i wanted to make a visual effect of breaking apart a GameObject when destroyed, should I use unity particle system to do so? or should I make an animation of that game object breaking and use that instead?
to summeize should I be making animation for things such as rain effects and confetti and fire effect instead of making them with the particle system? is there any drawback to using one over the other?
As TEEBQNE said it is your choice between animations and the particle system depending on what you need. If your team is small or you are a single developer it is best to opt for the particle system for the flexibility of changes and quick execution.
Optimising the particle system is not hard, just make sure you don't overdo the numbers and avoid some common mistakes. There is a list of the best practices for optimization on mobile games found here
You can also find some pretty good looking particles premade in the unity asset store, which are already optimized well.
I'm wondering about the best way of reducing my CPU and memory overhead for areas of the game world that do not need to be updated every frame.
I have just started to consider this issue as I'm currently implementing a shadow detection system using Raycasts.
My problem is this:
I can have about 100 lights in my level that on every frame send a Raycast to nearby characters to determine if these characters are in shadows.
My game is a low poly PC game, and I understand the overhead from Raycasting isn't that drastic. So its not a major concern. But I'm still not sure of the best approach to optimising this.
I have been thinking of a few soltions, but am unsure if there is "standard" per say.
1. exit update loop if player is too far away
void Update() {
if (Vector3.Distance(playerPos, transform.position) > someRadius) {
return
}
}
This is the most glaringly obvious solution, with even more obvious concerns.
This update loop will still be hogging CPU cycles , performing 2 calculations on every frame, for every light point.
2. Disable Light gameObjects when the player is too far away
This method is more efficient in terms of CPU overhead, as those will be negated. However I'm still hogging uneccesary memory.
In order to make this solution more scalable I would have to design some kind of "enabler" that keeps track of game objects that should be enabled/disabled based on the player position.
But at this point I know I'm re-inventing the wheel, and feel very sure that there is an industry standard for this.
Is there an alternative to enabling/disabling?
I see a lot of game developers talking about physically unloading areas of their game from memory and writing those areas to disk, when the player is not nearby.
I wonder is this achieved by simply destroying and re-instantiating the objects.
Question
Is Unity opionated about this?
The page here lists an example, similar to my first solution. But they are talking about 100s of thousands of updates per frame here.
Maybe I don't need to worry as much as I think
Thanks!
If you want not render objects, that are not in your camera area, Occlusion culling is what you exactly need. Watch this link:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html
If You want change how your object looks based on range between camera and your object, You have to use LOD(Level Of Detail). Here is documentation:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-LODGroup.html
I have been building a game for VR using Unity3d. It has only low poly models and the file size is less then 40 mb still the game lags when played on mobile.. Please suggest how to improve the performance..
Thank you in advance..
In order to improve performance in VR for mobile you have to optimize everything as best as you can, you should keep some of these variables in mind:
Graphics Side
- Number of polygons in the scene
- How many source of lighting do you have
Programming Side
- How much work is taking your code, is doing it efficiently?
The programming part can include problems within the physics system, also some logic problems that can probably decrease the overall performance because of higher computation.
My advice is to learn about the Profiler that unity offers, actually you can observe how much work is taking your code and where exactly it is your bottle-neck. This video also can be useful.
Of course a solution could be implement your code following design standards, like design patterns and software architecture (depending on the size of the project).
I hope it can be useful for you!
What I found from developing and launching a vr game is some of the issues below
Number of polygons is usually your first to check even though your models are low poly. For example, I looked at Synty models in the unity store and some of them were over 1k for a bag and 7k for a character model. This seriously reduce the amount of objects you can if you want to target a max of 50000 per eyes.
With some models, you can use blender and the decimate tool to reduce the polygon count pretty easily. From there I would use LOD's to reduce their count further based on distance.
Use occlusion culling (pro version only)
Set your camera distance to maybe a 100 instead of the default
Use mobile shaders and careful using some of the standard shaders as they are expensive. Also transparent shaders will becomes expensive cause overdraw.
Batch your textures and make them static if possible
Don't use dynamic shadows on lighting but instead bake your lights
Try to avoid using physics as this becomes expensive and instead raycast to trigger events or shooting weapons.
Run profiler often and check for any bottlenecks (pro version only)
Reduce the count of Particles effects and their values
Character bones can also cause issue so remove as many as possible
There is also your code to look at as mentioned by Manujamming
Set quality setting to low in the inspector to gain best performance.
Could you provide a screenshot of your game scene?
I hope this makes sense.
Best of luck!
I want to create an explosion particle system, but I'm not sure how can I do it. I was thinking create a fire particle system with emitter shape being an Sphere and after that just increasing sphere radius, but I don't know how can I animate it's size. Does anyone tell me how can I do that? Or does anyone have a better idea?
Emitter systems for particles are setting initial particle directions, and the rate they'll move at. That's generally how a visual representation of an explosion is created.
So rather than increasing the size of the emitter source to present an explosion, the dissemination of the particles in an outward direction creates the appearance of an explosion.
You're not limited to one batch of particles, nor one type of particles, nor just one emitter. The best explosions are a highly complex layering of different particle types with different textures, coming from different emitters at differing rates, with differing rates of decay, spin rates, colour changes and falloff in both transparency and movement speed.
Making a truly great looking explosion is a real art form and will often take a good designer days to do with a GUI and constant real time playback, especially when trying to minimise the use of textures, quads, blends, fillrate and physics.
Here's a video from Unreal Engine, wherein similar concepts and qualities as what's available in Scene Kit are used to teach the terminology. It's not a 1:1 parallel with the Scene Kit particle engine, but it's probably the best combination of visuals and simplistic explanations to help you rapidly understand what is possible and how to do it with particles.
//caveat: Unreal Engine probably has the best real time particle engine in the world at the moment, so it's a little more advanced than what's in Scene Kit.
But...the principles are essentially the same:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXK2Xbd7D9w
I'm quickly prototyping an iPad game and have been using frame-based collision detection. It's very much needing per pixel collision detection. Is there an easy way to implement this or any guides I could look at to hacking together my own? Google only brings up people in my similar predicament which does not bode well.
Ok. We had a game where we needed this.
One solution which worked was doing glreadpixel. But on the 3G, after a point when we added more objects in the game it became a bottleneck. 3GS, iPad and new iPhone/iPod should perform a lot better. Remember to read more, as glReadPixel is very costly and blocking call. But experimenting won't hurt.
Later we chose to use our own collision maps with curves and lines to do terrain collision. Similar to Box2d.