Everyday Unity

String Interning - To Use or Not to Use? A Performance Question - String interning in non-native AOT is very slow and can drastically affect your application performance. - If you call string.Intern in your code you probably should think if you really should. - A very naive custom string cache based on ConcurrentDictionary<string, string> is drastically faster then the string interning cache and gives you an opportunity to clean-up the cache. - If your app runs as a Native AOT app, then the performance is good, and the only drawback of the bulit-in string interning is an inability to clean it. https://sergeyteplyakov.github.io/Blog/benchmarking/2023/12/10/Intern_or_Not_Intern.html #interning

Intro to Shader Graph in Unity 2022 (Your first graph, Textures & UVs, Transparency and Alpha) For a long time, I was quite skeptical of Shader Graph due to the suboptimal performance of generated shaders. Consequently, I focused on learning HLSL. However, given the abundance of learning resources on Shader Graph, I decided to use it in my prototypes. It allows for the quick and easy addition of test shaders for my VFX. Now, I can confidently recommend trying it to save time during prototyping, especially if you are not highly proficient in HLSL. And as always, don't believe anyone about performance, profile yourself your particular game. Probably shader graph would be ok for you even in production. https://danielilett.com/2023-09-26-tut7-3-intro-to-shader-graph/ https://danielilett.com/2023-12-04-tut7-4-intro-to-shader-graph-part-2/ https://danielilett.com/2023-12-11-tut7-5-intro-to-shader-graph-part-3/ #shadergraph

Managed memory reservation in Unity Control heap growth in Unity using heap growth divisor to reserve memory before it is needed. The author provides a better way to do it compared to a large array allocation on the app start. https://vbor.blog/posts/heap-realloc/ #memory #gc

Updated 2022 LTS Best Practice Guides for optimizing games | Unity Blog Two new books featuring optimization tips and tricks for mobile, consoles, and PC have been released. I've skimmed through both materials; all the tips have already been published in various resources. However, it's great to have them compiled in one place with navigation via the contents page. I highly recommend bookmarking these books. https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/updated-2022-lts-best-practice-guides #optimization

Unity Case Study: Vampire Survivors This blog post is a good starting point for developers who are interested in learning more about architecture principles for Unity games and how to analyze other projects. https://medium.com/@simon.nordon/unity-case-study-vampire-survivors-806eed11bebb #review

ParrelSync is a Unity editor extension that allows users to test multiplayer gameplay without building the project by opening another Unity editor window and mirroring changes from the original project. Gonna come in handy especially given the new template release: small scale competitive multiplayer. https://github.com/VeriorPies/ParrelSync/ Template: https://forum.unity.com/threads/small-scale-competitive-multiplayer-template-now-released.1520044/ #netcode #editortools

Soft Mask: a plugin that brings alpha-friendly masking to UI It works almost like the standard Unity's mask, but supports alpha, which enables gradual and semi-transparent masks. Repo: https://github.com/olegknyazev/SoftMask Demo: https://olegknyazev.itch.io/softmask #ui #mask

PrimeTween High-performance, allocation-free tween library for Unity. Create animations, delays, and sequences in one line of code. A lot faster than other tween libs according to author's benchmarks. It would be interesting to see comparison to Magic Tween too in the same benchmarks, because Magic Tween is claimed to be even faster than PrimeTween https://github.com/KyryloKuzyk/PrimeTween Performance comparison: https://github.com/KyryloKuzyk/PrimeTween/discussions/10 #tween

Web runtime updates are here: Take your browser to the next level A lot of new features for web builds: compute shaders, GPU skinning, SIMD, better exception handling and more https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/web-runtime-updates-enhance-browser-experience #webgpu #web

UI Toolkit: New and updated demos for programmers and artists I’ve seen some Entities samples by Unity Technologies that use UI toolkit for in-game UI and not just for editor tools. It was interesting to play around a bit, but I have no real experience working with it in production yet. If anyone has used UI toolkit for in-game UI in production, I would be happy to hear about your feedback in the comments. https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/new-ui-toolkit-demos-for-programmers-artists Quiz sample: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/quizu-a-ui-toolkit-sample-268492 Dragon Crashes sample: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/ui-toolkit-sample-dragon-crashers-231178 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtQist-I3Xo #uitoolkit

🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 Gamedev • 2 | November • 2023 We are publishing the second edition of the Gamedev compilation! A week ago, we released the first edition within our channel community. Surprisingly, many enthusiasts reached out to participate. And now – one link and a compilation of 10 channels are again in a separate folder for you! Gamedev • 2 Every week, 10 channels about gamedev ➕ In several channels from our community ➕ In all channels from the weekly compilation Disclaimer: all other channels are in russian language, you can try to use a built-in Telegram translator feature to check them out. The current compilation includes MD/LD Celestial Beasts Про гейм-дизайн за 5 минут Everyday Unity Лев Дизайнит Кодзима Гений - канал про геймдизайн Лавка Разработчика lediiana Креативный Анатолий KSI Games × О геймдеве __ How to get featured in the compilation? Fill out the form We'll check relevance to the theme and audience presence Make a post with the weekly compilation We'll reach out to you before publication Share if you find this helpful!

Animated Progress Bar: Coloured animated progress bar made in Unity, with Shader Graph Repo: https://github.com/MirzaBeig/animated-progress-bar-shader-graph Demo: https://mirzabeig.github.io/Animated-Progress-Bar-WebGL/ #progressbar #ui

The current version of Unity Shader Graph supports the Custom Render Texture target. It's handy to generate a dynamic cubemap. A Unity sample project showing how to provide an animated cubemap https://github.com/keijiro/DynamicCubemapTest #rendertexture #cubemap

Design decisions when building games using ECS A fine write-up about problems you would most likely face when developing an ECS game https://arielcoppes.dev/2023/07/13/design-decisions-when-building-games-using-ecs.html #ecs #architecture

Unity ECS Performance Testing The second post in my series on automated testing with Unity.Entities, where I shared why I believe performance testing is valuable and worth adopting. I also provided examples in the post, along with a sample repo that you can use to skip setting it up yourself in your project. https://gamedev.center/unity-ecs-performance-testing-the-way-to-the-best-performance/ Repo with the sample: https://github.com/AlexMerzlikin/UnityEntities-AutomatedTests-Sample #ecs #dots #performance #testing

A Primer on Unity Addressables and UGS Cloud Content Delivery A very basic, step-by-step guide on how to set up Addressables and UGS for content delivery. Worth adding to bookmarks for when you would need to set up this pipeline, for example, for a prototype, since this setup will be free with the current pricing plans for small scale tests and prototypes. https://dev.to/attiliohimeki/a-primer-on-unity-addressables-and-ugs-cloud-content-delivery-4n1d #addressables #ugs #ccd