After uploading I realized I never specified it in the video. Basically every game where you have a big enough (or complex enough) connected game world that you have to load and unload content to achieve 60fps in the build. In my specific case it was when we had more than 3million triangles on the screen while going through the world, at about 100k GameObjects, about a map size of 2km x 1km. At that point lightmapping stopped working, occlusion culling broke, it took 70 seconds to recompile or jump into play mode and we had less than 30 fps. I profiled the game and editor for two months and tried absolutely everything to fix it. This video shows what I've found out. What works and what doesn't work. Recompile time is now about 10 seconds, jumping into play mode 5 seconds, navigating the scene camera is smooth, the game runs at ~70-80fps at 4k with an RTX 3070 and 6-Core CPU and in 2k on many systems (playtesters had no issues). And it's now scaleable, we can add levels without any slowdowns and we can collaborate without merge conflicts (the last point took another month, creating the multi-scene setup).

Thanks for answering !

@@johnleorid Amazing! Thank you for sharing! :D

@@johnleorid 3 million? my game exceeds 30 million very often lol

@@TYNEPUNK *3 Million, despite occlusion culling xD

Good point!

Well, origin shifting is one way to do it, aswell I know teams have just modified the engine they're using to use double-precision coords (CIG did this with CryEngine to get their space, yknow, space-y without having to deal with MMO synchronized world origin shifting, also Epic did this and UE5 natively uses double precision coordinates out of the box now), and then your distance limit becomes so ludicrous that it's barely even worth considering unless you're making a space sim in which everything must always exist in the same scene at the same time. However, with Unity, you need to pay them ridiculous sums of cash to get access to the source code in the first place to even begin on a change like this (which is absolutely insane on its own and anti-consumer as hell when every single other major engine has source out of the box), so YMMV if using this engine.

@@xanderkyron I never saw this as much of a hassle. The C# code can run just fine logic with using custom double Vectors. Custom Netcode can also use double precision. Just anything that has to do with the client visualization and local physics needs to be converted to 32bit float. But then again, the relevant scene is near the camera anyways. Things further away would be turned off or rendered in a different way (second scene camera to render a scaled down solar system, that is the backdrop when travelling for example). The world in a huge game like Star Citizen is also not just a simple scene with objects plopped in, but a more complex process to generate local scenes on the fly. So its also possible in Unity with the right approach. Of course, just compiling all those systems with using doubles would be the cleaner approach, if the engine allows that.

Gaia has a floating point fix function, takes care of this auto 👍

I noticed this while working on a scene that would move the focus of the scene to a location, which would never be reachable by conventional means, as a way to do some tutorial cutscenes without having to load an entirely new scene... my animated model was shaking like she was on a speedball drug or something. My solution was inevitably to move these constructs closer to the bottom of the terrain mesh. It didn't make any sense to me why the issue was resolved by doing this and it's still not something I completely understand but it is what it is.

While working on the event system video, I am thinking about a video about scoping and planning a game, the whole preproduction phase that a lot of devs seem to skip. (I am guilty of this too, as well as feature creep)

@@johnleorid that would be awesome

Honestly, this is a good problem to have. My boss (20 years of xp in the industry www.youtube.com/@SamuelAsherRivello) was telling me stories of some people that were excellent at coding but couldn't come up with the visual aspects of the game, which is honestly what should drive everything anyway

​@@alexandratrenkova9339that's me all the way lol trying to train myself to be more Creative, etc lmao

Cause Unity is trash

@@hollownxt1295 not really lol, it's an excellent tool that has some unfortunate limitations. It's a perfectly good engine for games with smaller scopes and for beginner game devs looking to prototype things quickly.

@@jomalomal Unreal Engine for has better and more tools and it’s free…

@@hollownxt1295 Epic take 30% of your revenue

@@Finlzz and? With Unity you’re not getting any

Working on it ^^

@@johnleorid Nice, I would love it !

@@johnleorid cant wait to see it.

yeh i dont get that event system really

++++

True, floating point precision is indeed a problem for games with a big world map. After I uploaded the video, I realized that I never specified what I meant with "Big Games". xD But I guess most of what I said applies to a lot of ambitious games. ^^

Wait unity doesn’t have double precision support? REALLY?!

@@saul8510 as a data type it has the double variable. But not for transforms positions, rotations and scale… Every huge map must have its own workaround to “fix” it.

@@johnleorid are you working in big company? Btw, how to start? What to learn first to be able navigating intuitively In all of this?

@@FirstnameLastname-my7bz I'm working at a company. Not small, not big, just a company. XD I would suggest looking for "unity beginner tutorials" and you should definitely start small. My first game was ~12 grey cubes and a horribly animated character to jump from one cube to the next one.

would love to know more about this, what would you consider a more advanced guide to optimization?

@@aliatef7203 Thanks for the question. I am NOT a Unity developer but, I have a video example from the original 'Doom' that points out just how a basic AI works (ukposts.info/have/v-deo/p6dyrJCHfG-SkXk.html). Now, this is a 'basic' AI routine from one of my favorite early games. Think about how many times the CPU is checked just during these processes. Now, add in all the modern AI complexities. You can see how just the graphics and AI can cause stuttering and other issues just because we did not take into consideration the overall game view. Then there are other videos and such that explain UI/player feedback, Collision detection (both player, NPC and Enemies. Then you have the animations and a host of logic issues within the game environment. Now, think about pulling all of this off within a few compute cycles. Think of everything your console or computer has to process 'between' rendered frames. This is why there are 'bad ports'. This is why beta and alpha testing is super important. You need to examine how different people approach a level or encounter. You need good notes and issues documented. This info will allow you to 'fix' issues/approaches that you 'the developer' might not have thought of. The key to making a 'solid game' is hidden within making all of these systems work in a logical and unified way. I can make the best damn environment in the history of the world. However, if I (the environment guy) take up all the system resources to place pretty pictures in a player's face, where does the AI, UI, Collision Detection for all the entities, 'score calculation' and a host of other processes, exist? A good reference for this issue would be the game "Anthem". Visually stunning game, at the sacrifice to game play. This was likely an issue with 'uber graphics' and a lack of game play space reserved within the hardware limits.... Just my opinion but, I think if they scaled back the visual crap, it would have left room for more complex and interesting gameplay. Hope that explains things a little bit. A grand 'balance' is what is needed in any game. Look good, play well and accomplish all the entertainment aspects without a complete sacrifice of any aspect of the development. As you can see, just based on this simple example, there is HUGE potential for tutorials concerning game dev optimization. I do not have 'all the answers'. I would never claim that. I just want to point out that there is something to be said about showing all the different aspects of game dev. However, I think the smart developer will need to be able to find the compromises needed within all of these systems in order to make a smooth playing and interesting game overall.

I agree with most of what you've said but I don't think a lack of gameplay in e.g. Anthem is because of hardware limitiations (better writing and more interesting puzzles as well as a more fleshed out skill tree and less micro-transactions) but a lack of manpower. If 75% of your team is focused on making pretty environments, writing shaders and optimizing the content loading, then you have no one left who designs interesting quests or provides the tools to make cool quests possible. And changes. Changes have destroyed Cyberpunk 2077, probably Fallout 76, Hawken and a lot of other games. Another big topic. ^^

​@@johnleorid Wow, someone who sees a level of nuance in the game development world XD I've even met game developers that don't have that. It's in the end all about resource allocation, focus, etc. Frankly a generic game should probably be about 25% coding, 25% art/sound and 25% game design, 25% world (lore, etc). Doesn't matter if you have the prettiest or best coded game in the world if the sound/art design is fucking terrible and the overall game design is horrific, or if the lore is terrible. But these percentages is OBVIOUSLY dependent on the individual project. An artsy game like Braid is probably like 10% coding, 30% art, 40% game design and 20% world. But yeah, Frostbite (I think it was) for Anthem was NOT designed for the open world which was demanded of them, and they essentially had to spend WAY too much time on fixing that stuff up.

Well, Unity is infamous for being able to make simple things very hard. Not to mention editor performance. Devs clearly did not had in mind open world games when developing engine.

Not sure if you're aware of the full quote because of the way you used it sounded quite condescending, at least that's how I interpreted it. Here is the full quote though “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." I hope if you were unaware before you'll now be able to enlighten any ignorant person that tries to use that quote as an insult. Cheers!

I am 37, literally have been at this as long as you have. I am a 3D artist that now teaches coding at the university level. I completely agree

@@ikobi4807 More like delusional air blower XD

I once tried using pure raytracing in a game using ships made of components made 100% in OpenSCAD for a simple (well okay not really) Eve clone prototype, but with Nexus: TJI ship combat, with each ship having their own 100% virtual machine to run the ship. Not for the weak of cpu, but size was tiny for what I had. Even if cpu was no issue, it did not run very well and looked way too Fortnite, but the idea was solid. Too much work though.

32 here, and I frankly disagree. I am a hobby programmer at best, doing the starts of an MMO here. Knowledgeable about game development, sure. Intelligent, sure... Experienced? Nope... but it helps. But all you really need is basic knowledge, know that you have to optimize, etc. and search up the rest. A plan? Not really. You do need to know an overall goal you want to work towards, but even with huge games, you can still take it step by step. It just needs more prework than most other projects. EDIT: Oh yeah, by pre-work, I more mean the optimization, step by step keeping the game together and not just solve problems at "some point".

The frame debugger really helps when you know what you are doing. Back when we had GPU performance problems and I had basically no idea about batching, instanced rendering and draw calls and so on, it wasn't a helpful tool for me. But you are right, I sould've mentioned it.

@@johnleorid hello there im just started to learn and bought gaia pro 2021 that has an option for multi tile terrain streaming but im not a coder but wanne be an artist do you have some tips. Like how to load and unload like building or vegetations only on the terrain tile where the player is at the moment how does that work whithout coding is that possible . And should i do when making the things like you said in your video to only stream load and unload where the player is like vegetation or buildings. I know that with npc s and crowd you can spaan them in when enter a region by triggers but what about buildings props vegetation etc is that possible

The Unity Frame Debugger isn't very good. Use RenderDoc (or Pix or Nsight) instead. Right-click the game tab to get a button for taking a RenderDoc capture.

@@johnleorid can i have a video or some informative links about these topics (batching and stuff) too. Would really like that

One of my first unity projects was in URP and one of the first issues I ran into was placing more than 8 real-time point lights and they’d disable themselves kuz only 8 can be loaded at a time- that pushed me to learn about baked lighting and light probes. So fucking worth

mixed lighting means one light illumination works for baked lightmaps for static objects, realtime lighting for dynamic objects, and realtime shadows for all ( or shadowmask for static). it's no better than baked lighting workflow. The pc/console game industry has ditched lightmaps (baked and mixed light in unity) for years, So just use realtime gi workarounds.

In V2022.1 there are material variants which provide pretty much the same functionality - but afaik they are still assets you have to create.

Not to mention that any game with a civilization that's often at war, has massive internal conflicts, or is pre-modern era in style would realistically have walls for towns, villages, and cities anyway.

overworlds lol

Good points, about the UI point, there is actually a way to change the default values of Unity components, so you could disable raycast target and maskable by default, without a custom script. Im at work so I can't open Unity right now, but the option is hidden somewhere in the player settings menu

@@r1pfake521 oh yeah I know that one, in my case I needed a script since i did extra checks like checking if i had a parent that had a mask component before toggling maskable on , or whenever i create a button the script automatically unticks all raycast targets on children and adds a single "collider" image under it called "Interactable" that recieve the ui callbacks

Still working on it. The coding video will be a bit longer, so it will take more time to make it. ^^

Was collecting footage, writing code, doing a lot of research and working on Games (also for the video) in the last weeks and started actually working on the video (in the videocutting software) within the last week. You can ring the bell to get a notification when it's ready and uploaded. ^^

REX? ^^

@@johnleorid my bad, experience feedback basically. I thought it was an international term (I'm french).

@@johnleorid notification activated!

@@Sogeshing ah thanks for the follow-up :)

So I started building a scene management system and I still have so many questions about what you have on screen here. What does the "Free" indicate in the hierarchy view? Another clip seems to suggest it's some sort of locking for VCS? Is there a reason you don't remove the scenes from the hierarchy when unloading them? How did you go about making preview images for scenes? What does the Switch/Add tab do in the Load/Unload window? I assume Add New makes a new data structure to hold a multi-scene composition, but is that assumption true? What are the scenes titled "Notes_" used for? As in, what is in them? Sorry if that's a bit much. Thank you again for this video; it's a goldmine!

Free, Editing, Locked & Modified are the states of a scene, used for merge-conflict-free collaboration. States are written to a custom server and I am using git hooks to know when a user has pulled or pushed. So based on timestamps I can prevent someone from acquiring a scene that wasn't pulled and also preventing unlocking a scene that wasn't pushed. It's not perfect but with only one branch this solved all our issues.

Preview images.. I just used the scene camera, writing to a render texture, which I then convert to a standard texture and this into a byte array if I remember correctly. When opening the window for the first time after recompile, I convert the (serialized) byte array back to the textures.

Keeping scenes in the Hierarchy has the sole purpose of being able to right-click and load them without the editor tool. Just a backup/alternative. ^^

The switch/add tab let's me jump to the main menu, debug/test scenes and it let's me quickly add the lighting and player scene. With those two scenes I have correct lighting and everything I need to play the game in any scene I want (player & UI are in the player scene. Despite not having any direct references, it's convenient to have those in the same scene)

Very good tip, make small projects like you're making big ones before graduating to bigger ones

Lightmaps for our game would have been 400GB on the disk. I don't think you can upload a game of this size to steam nor will anyone download it, even if they have enough space on their hard drive. The new probe volumes on the other hand would be suitable for baking lights, but these didn't exist when I made the video. It's still a workflow pain to bake so I'd avoid it wherever possible.

I'm not sure what you mean. In Unity, deactivating is just "npcGameObject.SetActive(false)", there isn't really anything to it, besides a simple distance check and maybe an angle check using "Vector3.Angle()". If it's a crowd system, there might be more to it, like pooling and randomizing their looks before re-spawing. Getting Spawn Points can be done using the NavMesh or using points, set by the level-designer, which run a simple sight of line check before spawning. Crowd systems can be much more complicated, especially when you want them to be visible from far away. There are so many attemps, using GPU Instancing, Billboards, excessive LOD in Visuals & Code, the whole pathfinding, sharing paths, using Flow-Fields instead of A-Star. But I don't expect any indie dev to make a game in a densly populated city. Even AA and AAA have problems pulling this off. And when it's a sparsingly populated town, the content loading system should do most of the work. Everything on top of that is just for further optimization.

@@johnleorid Yeah, that's what I'm referring to... using SetActive is pretty obvious :) but the process by which you determine which ones should be enabled and which should be disabled is what I'm referring to. I know it seems simple enough when you've been doing this for awhile but there are a lot of newcomers who don't understand algorithms to do this logic and I think such explanations would be super helpful for them. Even in your response to me, it pretty much came down to theory and rough ideas, which is something such people get told a lot... "just do this and this general idea" without any specifics as to how to do those specifics, and many of the tutorials I've seen online that don't delve into code just stick with general theory that doesn't really help those people in particular. It's something that I've personally always wanted to make tutorials on, but... well... I suck at making tutorials :) and having even more noise on youtube won't help anyone. :)