Too many Tabs! Help

Unity Engine
1

Greetings everyone! I’ve switched to Unity very recently and I need help with UI.

I made a user interface that holds many tabs , each tab will take the user to specific window (Items , Quests , Gears , Upgrades , Etc) you name it , it is there (seriously, you want a tab for people who like trains it is there). here is the thing , it is taking too much RAM on smart phones. what is the best way to tackle this issue?

The approach that I have in mind is to :

  1. Disable all the other tabs
  2. Unload all resources(images) from the closed tab
  3. load all resources from current tab
  4. display the tab

Please notify me if there is a better approach or guidlines to follow regarding this issue. also 1 more question :
does disabling an object affects GPU/RAM performance or only CPU? as far as i know, disabling an objects/and scripts reduces the number of Updates being called every frame and drawing calls but pleasse correct me if i am wrong. I’m Very new to unity UI so anything i need to know that would help me in developing good UI for smartphone would be much appreciated

2

up :frowning: i hope thats allowed

3

Hi Apro,

I think the cleanest way to do this would be to store each tab as a prefab, and then load the whole tab in when you need to, and destroy it when you switch tabs (see code [I hope you’re using C#]).

public Transform tabParent;

    public void LoadAndDraw(string tabName)
    {
        //Destroy existing tab(s)
        DestroyTabs();
        //Load the prefab from resources and Instantiate
        GameObject instance = Instantiate(Resources.Load(tabName, typeof(GameObject))) as GameObject;
        //Make the new instance a child of the correct object in scene
        instance.transform.SetParent(tabParent);
    }

    void DestroyTabs()
    {
        //This is a quick way to desroy the existing tab(s) assuming that everything which is a child of the tabParent can be deleted
        foreach(Transform tab in tabParent)
        {
            Destroy(tab);
        }

        //Clean up
        Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets();
    }

Disabled Objects do not send draw calls, so the GPU should not have any load from a disabled object. as for RAM, all objects in the scene are loaded into memory, active or not. If RAM is a problem, use the code above; if processing speed is an issue you’re better just leaving all the tabs (or the most common ones) in the scene but inactive.

Hope this helps!

Elis

4

Hey Elis!! Really thanks for this approach! My processing speed is not issue at all so far , I’m just using too much RAM ^^ I’ll be trying this approach tonight and see how it goes , from the looks of it , it should get the exact results I’m hoping for :slight_smile:

really appreciate giving me some of your time :slight_smile: wishing you nice day and stay cool!