Diablo like game: Static or Dynamic batching?

Questions & Answers
1

** Context: **

I’ve been working on a top-down dungeon crawler for 6 months. All assets are tileable and I have quite big maps. Dynamic batching works perfectly smooth, but when I use Unity’s Beast lightmapping, all assets don’t make use of dynamic batching (obviously I guess as the lightmap texture is per asset) and drawcalls increase from roughly 20 to 300.

I intend to buy Unity Pro once I reach a higher development stage, and with it, I could use the static batching to batch the whole scene, but I’m afraid that would slow down the game, as the scenarios are quite big.

Question:

So, anyone has experience in this?

  • Shall I use lightmaps and static batching?
  • Or forget about the lightmaps and let Unity3D handle the objects with dynamic batching?

Thank you very much in advance.

2

Use both, really. Static batching is for static geometry. You will get maximum performance benefit when using it for scenery. That way you will unload stress from dynamic batching system so it will be able to batch UI or dynamic clutter, fx more efficiently. If you open unity profiler you will see mesh count spikes indicating rebatching which occurs for every of dynamic objects available in scene especially when game involves lots of movement and culling events.