performance-friendly explosions

News & General Discussion
1

Hi there,

just a tiny little question. I already searched the forum but it seems I can not find what I am looking for… I’m currently starting with a new game and I want to have a lot of eye candy going on. Mostly, I want to have explosions going on all over the screen. Therefore I decided to use the detonator framework as I am in the early prototyping stage. Unfortunately those explosions - although they are looking really fantastic and awesome - are too expensive when it comes to performance: frame rate is dropping low and when there is too much going on I already saw frame rates of 25, 20 and lower. The project is already making use of object pooling and I already changed the detonator scripts to fit that need but still performance cost is much too high (so it’s not an issue of constant instantiating and destroying). Deactivating explosions suddenly stabilizes performance so it really is that.

Do you know any other explosion assets (3D, not necessarily mobile-friendly) that are more performance-friendly or is there an other easy way to create explosions that look as fantastic as the detonator framework at a lower performance cost? (Don’t know if it’s an issue with the detonator pack or if that performance cost comes from Shuriken)

Maybe I can go for a shader based solution but I fear it won’t reach the visual gorgeousness of shuriken-based solutions: Easy volumetric explosion in Unity3D | Steven Craeynest

2

My guess is that you’re eating your available fill rate. You want less particle sprites which are each more opaque, rather than more sprites that are less opaque. Of course the more opaque they are the more obvious the individual particles each become, so it’s a balancing act.

Check out “Overdraw” mode in the Scene view when your game is running. The brighter that is the more fill rate you’re eating. PC graphics cards are pretty darn nice, but even they have their limits.

How many particle effects do you want to have? And how close to the screen are they / how much of the screen is filled with particles? What’s your target specs, etc?

1 Like