10 proven strategies for optimizing multiplayer games in Unity

Let’s look at the benefits of multiplayer games:

• Gamers get a more engaging and immersive experience; by playing with or competing against others, gameplay is more exciting.
• Multiplayer games in Unity enable players to interact and forge friendships.
• Competitive gaming has become popular, thanks to Multiplayer games in Unity, where organized tournaments and prizes attract hordes of gamers.

While Unity is a powerful engine, even popular games made with Unity can have certain issues that can affect performance, like:

• Scripting issues – Game performance can be slowed by misused coroutines, redundant calculations, and inefficient loops.
• Memory strains – Lags can be caused by recurring garbage collection, memory leaks, and large assets that aren’t optimized.
• Asset loading delays – Gameplay gets disrupted when there is synchro? nous loading and large assets are loaded on the go.
• Graphics overload – This is caused by overuse of high-poly models and unoptimized shaders and impacts rendering.
• Physics complications – Game physics is hampered if there is excess reliance on real-time simulations, convoluted calculations, and too many colliders.

Now that we know the problems in multiplayer games using Unity, let’s see how you can tackle them.

1. Profiling

Profiling the target devices early and frequently is the first mantra to follow in the optimization process. The first step is recognizing what is hampering the performance. To optimize Unity games, you need to identify the bottlenecks, for which you can use the inbuilt Unity tool called Profiler. You can track things like rendering performance, memory, CPU, and GPU, and identify aspects that need to be improved.

Regular monitoring can help you detect and resolve anomalies like spikes and prevent potential issues. Remember to incorporate profiling at the initial stage of Unity game development, as it will enable you to catch the issues early. Otherwise, they will be enmeshed in your code so deeply that fixing the problem later may become exhausting.

Whenever you make any big change to the game system, add new features, or prepare to release the game on a different platform, make sure you perform profiling. Here’s what the different Unity Profiler segments can help you with:

• GPU usage – Tells you how the multiplayer game in Unity uses the GPU, critical for visual-intensive games.
• Rendering – Gives you in-depth information about rendering metrics like overdraw and draw calls.
• Memory profiling – Enables tracking memory allotment and alerts you about potential memory leaks.

2. Managing memory

Now here’s something you need to pay special attention to. By monitoring and managing memory properly, you can eliminate memory leaks and spikes and avoid drastic slowdowns. If the allocated memory is improperly deallocated, the memory usage keeps rising with time. Retaining object references not needed currently, improper resource disposal, and unnecessary allocation of temporary objects can lead to memory leaks. Ensuring prompt remediation of leaks can help maintain performance stability in multiplayer games in Unity.

Object pooling means reusing objects that are frequently used instead of continuously creating and discarding them.
For example, invading enemies in a wave-based game, or bullets in a shooting game. Constant object instantiation and destruction leads to heavy overheads. It can be significantly reduced within the inbuilt Object Pool class and third-party libraries that enable reuse of such objects.

Unity offers the Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets method to unload assets not needed any more, and release unused memory. When you have to transition between scenes or have scenes with huge asset loads, this method helps you to deallocate unused assets, reducing memory spikes.

3. Optimizing scripting

Unity provides the Update() method to apply game logic that needs frequent updates when you want to create multiplayer games with unity. Excessively using this feature can hamper performance, more so when there are multiple objects executing similar tasks. You can ensure fewer calls by consolidating the logic within Update().

The coroutines feature enables you to execute tasks over several frames while keeping the main thread unobstructed. You can limit the use of Update() checks by using coroutines for tasks or events that don’t require updates in every frame. Using a coroutine to wait for a definite period to implement an event will eliminate the need to check for a timed event in all the frames.

Unity provides the GetComponent feature to recover game object components; however, excess reliance on this method slows the performance of multiplayer games in Unity. You can cache the GetComponent result and reuse it to avoid looking it up frequently.

4. Graphics settings

We don’t need to tell you twice how much the graphics settings can impact a Unity multiplayer game’s performance! If you want to ensure smooth gameplay and superior visual quality, optimizing graphics settings is vital. To save memory, you can decrease texture resolution and compress texture formats.

Depending on the target platform, adjust the quality settings so that you achieve a balance between performance and visual fidelity. You can decrease the texture memory footprint without compromising on quality by using formats like ASTC, DXT1, DXT5, and so on.

Ambient occlusion, bloom, motion blur, and other post-processing effects can enhance the visual appeal of the game, but can hamper performance. Assess which effects are critical for the gaming experience, and disable the unnecessary ones. Consider applying tailor-made post-processing shaders, with specific optimization, to deliver more engaging gaming experiences.

You can utilize the quality settings to ensure a balance between visual fidelity and performance for disparate hardware configurations. By creating different quality levels for shadow resolution, texture quality, and so on, you can guarantee smooth performance even on lower-end devices without hampering visual quality on higher-end devices.

5. Minimizing draw calls

Draw calls refer to how often the CPU talks to the GPU to render objects; every time that happens, there is some overhead. Reducing these calls can help improve performance substantially. Multiple objects can be combined into one draw call, decreasing the burden on both processors, and enhancing the performance of multiplayer games in Unity.

For still objects, you can use static batching, resulting in fewer draw calls. Static batches bring such objects into one mesh, allowing Unity to manifest them in one draw call. Simply mark the static objects in the Editor and enable static batching in the settings. This is especially effective in multiplayer games in Unity in scenes where you have terrain, buildings, and other static background elements.

For moving or changing objects, you need dynamic batching; here, fewer draw calls are needed to group and render objects with matching characteristics. While Unity handles these objects by itself, you can enhance effectiveness by making sure that materials are shared by those objects, and that there are fewer material variations.

You can combine several textures into one texture atlas, meaning you need fewer texture bindings, as also fewer draw calls for rendering. By creating one material referencing the atlas and adjusting the objects’ UV coordinates, you can map them to the correct atlas sections.

Shaders are GPU programs that decide the manner of object rendering, and optimizing them can improve performance substantially. You can simplify shader calculations, use fewer shader passes, and use systematic data structures to achieve this.

6. Level of detail (LOD) management

You can easily simplify the rendering of outlying objects by using different levels of detail and implement LOD for 3D models. Enhance performance further with occlusion culling along with billboard sprites and less complex models for distant objects.

Basically, you create several 3D model versions, with differing levels of detail. Low-detail versions are used when the object is distant, and the high-detail versions when it is closer to the camera. This way, you need to render fewer polygons, and can still ensure stunning visual imagery for your multiplayer games in Unity.

The LOD group component enables defining varying levels for 3D models, describing what level is to be used for specific distances. Proper configuration of the distances helps ensure smooth transition between the levels without sacrificing gameplay.

Occlusion culling automatically detects objects the camera cannot see, and ensures that they are not rendered, decreasing the number of draw cells and ensuring exceptional performance. This is very valuable in complicated scenes where multiple objects overlap.

The combination of occlusion culling and LOD managements lets you boost performance tremendously in your multiplayer games in Unity. This is especially in large-scale or open world environments where it is imperative to handle complex rendering.

7. Efficient physics management

The PhysX engine drives the physics system in Unity, and it offers precise and powerful physics simulations which can make for compelling multiplayer games in Unity. Physics calculations add significantly to computation load, and managing them efficiently is imperative. The fixed timestep decides how often physics updates are needed. Making adjustments to it is a critical part of physics management.

0.02 seconds is the default fixed timestep in Unity – which is roughly 50 updates in a second. Physics accuracy can be enhanced by reducing this number, but that means increasing the computation load, which could mean imprecise simulations. It is extremely important to find the optimal balance.

Mesh colliders are complex and increase computational load, while sphere and box colliders are simpler and have lesser load. To simplify physics calculations, you can use simple colliders, whether singly or combined.

You can even disable physics calculations for non-essential objects to ensure optimization; for example, objects that do not interact with objects or are not visible to the player. The Rigidbody.isKinematic and Collider.enabled methods in Unity help you control the objects’ physics behavior. You can enable and disable calculations dynamically depending on the state of the game, ease computation, and wow gamers with your multiplayer games in Unity.

8. Lighting efficiency

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Lighting information can be calculated in advance and stored in lightmaps; this method is called baked lighting. You can use this in static scenes to decrease computational overhead. The lighting system in Unity includes tools for baking lighting like shadow baking and global illumination. Ensure excellent runtime performance in your multiplayer games in Unity with superb lighting effects with baking lighting information.

The next thing you can do is record and store lighting information at predetermined points in scenes using light probes, especially for objects lit dynamically that traverse a baked environment. Lifelike lighting effects can be achieved by incorporating information from probes nearby, without lighting calculations in real-time, delivering a highly immersive gaming experience.

Using reflection probes will help you record and store environment reflections, which you can apply to reflective exteriors and improve visual quality and keep players engrossed.

Fewer real-time lights in your scene can also help boost performance in Unity online multiplayer games. Avoid continuous lighting information calculations; for static elements, utilize baked lighting to lighten computational load. If you have complicated scenes with numerous lights, you can also think of using deferred rendering, which is more efficient.

9. Lower the effect of garbage collection

The garbage collection feature in Unity deallocates memory from objects not needed any more, but this can cause spikes in performance. Temporary objects cause a lot of garbage generation, so you need to keep their allocation to a minimum.

By not assigning memory with the code’s performance-intensive sections and utilizing pooling, you can cut down on memory allocation, and subsequently, garbage collection.

Excess memory allocation can also be detected with the Profiler tool. A proper assessment of the patterns of memory allotment and remedying excessive garbage generation can help you in script optimization to ensure minimal garbage collection, and make your multiplayer games in Unity captivating.

10. Optimize animations

Yes, you need animations in games to keep the goosebumps going; but performance can be hampered by them, too. You can use GPU skinning, where the skinning computations from the central processor to your graphics processor is offloaded. This is especially valuable where you have a number of animated characters playing simultaneously and for characters that have complicated rigs.

Remove non-essential controllers, constraints, and bones, and simplify the rig structure to optimize Unity game animation rig. You can decrease the computational load by reducing the need for calculations.

Consider animation compression to decrease the memory required, with the help of Unity’s curve optimization and keyframe reduction methods. Play around with the settings till you find the balance between visual accuracy and superior performance.

We have abundant experience in optimizing multiplayer games in Unity that will keep players coming back to it. Whether it’s stunning lighting effects in survival games, or fast-paced narratives in shooting games, Juego Studios has the expertise to help you do it all. Talk to us now to hire Unity developers.