Optimizing Trees & Development: Video Devlog 19

The nineteenth weekly video devlog of Deterrence. This week I finish optimizing trees and create a fully featured prefab painting tool.

A tower defense mixed with real-time strategy where you repel attacking sentient AI robots until they give up.

Making Trees Optimal

Continuing with CG Geek's Low Poly Tree tutorial from last week, we learned that the tree as is - is not optimal. The performance problem lies in how the tree is being rendered. When the tree is imported into Unity, the tree has hundreds of child objects for each branch and each object requires more processing power. I found that when combining meshes into one object, performance was better. So, the amount of vertices does not have as much of an impact on performance as the amount of meshes.

To make CG Geek's Low Poly tree "Game Ready", I found a way to instantiate all of the particle system branches as real objects. Then I would combine all objects together as one mesh. Now, when the tree is imported into Unity, we get one object that takes two materials. Performance is now optimal since there are much fewer draw calls.

Making Useful Tools for Development

I expanded on my prefab spawning tool to give it all the features I need to build maps faster. I found a really awesome four-part lecture by Freya Holmér that's jam packed with info on how to build tools in Unity. I turned my simple one click tool into a fully featured painting tool that works with the Unity Editor.