First of all, I really like Unity and I think that I’ll choose it for my next project.
During these days I have read as much as possible about Unity but there are some questions that remains unanswered.
I wondering, for example, what kind of performance I can achieve expecially on low end hardware.
I know that a custom C/C++ engine should give me better performances and a minor overhead in charge of extra complexity, much more dev. time an so on… but I will be happy to have more information in terms of real numbers and if it is possible it should be nice to know something more about what happens when I select the “Build Game” option… for example, are my scripts interpreted? compiled?
Thanks a lot,
Marco Bambini
Italy
The Build Game option basically packs all the data you are using in your game together into a couple of files. It computes which files are actually used in the game by building a dependency graph from the scenes into all assets.
(This is really nice since it allows you to not worry about stuff in the Project folder since if it isn’t being used it won’t be shipped with the game)
All scripts are compiled into bytecode. The bytecode is JIT’d at runtime.
We are using Mono (www.Mono-project.com) for this.
Mono is extremely fast for a script language.
It is around half the speed of C++. Compared to eg. Python which is around a 20th the speed of C++.
Most performance bottlenecks in todays games are graphics related anyway, which is all done in C++. This of course very much depends on what kind of game you are creating, eg. this is obviously not true for a chess program.
For gooball we spent around 10% in game code on low end machines (G3 iBook)
Of course Gooball doesn’t use a lot of AI or anything so it can be a bit more in other games.
Gooball ran great on older machines and we got good reviews for its performance. We are committed to making all shaders working on old hardware using fallbacks. We are still having some issues with some shaders on GeForce2Mx cards and Rage 128’s but we are going to solve those issues soon.