Hi,
I have wrote an article on my blog about the challenges I had in using Unity Free for developing my game and I how I overcame some of those challenges. I’m posting this here because I think it might be of some help to people facing the same problems.
http://www.jungle-troll.com/2012/12/07/unity-optimizations-in-wisps/
Please feel free to share your opinions about the discussed issues.
Interesting article. We’ve come to the same conclusion on a couple of these points, and have a number of our own optimization and workaround experiences to share at a later date using Unity Pro. A few of the points I would consider game dev common practice rather than Unity issues, such as using vertex instead of pixel lights in forward rendering and setting culling masks, and large alpha particles on mobile devices is a well known hardware fill-rate issue. Vertex lighting is a similar issue to not using real-time shadows on point lights on low end machines, its all added calculations that consume valuable processor cycles.
A number of folks might read this as a “whats wrong with Unity” article, so it might be worth expanding the article to list a number of positives where Unity made your job easier or worked particularly well. For example it’s relative flexibility in many cases supporting the ability to produce workaround solutions.
There are solutions to some of the issues, like raycasting each frame during the move calculation on fast moving objects to see if a collider was hit, and then adjusting for the physics miss. But I’m sure you’ll have come across those during your research when the problem arose. If dynamic batching is not kicking in below a certain vertex threshold, that probably needs filing as a bug with example data.
Had a quick read. Saw very little in the optimisation space.
A few clever tricks all the same I guess