Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12-8.
Default menu in the Quality Settings Manager
The
Name
property is for your convenience so you can easily refer to a particular combination of
quality settings that you have designated. You can add a new quality level by using the Add Quality
Level button or delete it by clicking the trashcan icon.
Pixel lighting
is a rendering method that calculates the effect of your lights for every screen pixel.
The
vertex lighting
method is more efficient, in that only the effect of light on model vertices is
calculated and the remainder of the model surface lighting is interpolated from these values.
Dynamic lighting
means that the effect of a light on a game object is calculated every frame,
whether it be pixel or vertex lighting. If you have more than one pixel light illuminating a mesh, the
mesh is rendered once for each light, which adds up quickly in terms of processing overhead.
The
Pixel Light Count
property in the Quality Settings Manager is for setting the number of pixel
lights used in Forward Rendering, the standard rendering process. It is recommended that you not
let any one game object be illuminated by more than one pixel light, especially on mobile devices.
Alternatives include
Lightmapping
for static game objects, where the brightness of the surface of
the game object is precalculated. You can find the step-by-step procedure for lightmapping in the
Unity Manual. The end result is that game will run up to three times faster than it would with only
dynamic lighting.
Moving right along with the Quality Manager settings,
Texture Quality
sets the resolution globally,
meaning for the entire project. Higher resolutions take more processing. For a more customized
approach, you can use the Texture Import settings to assign the resolution for each texture.
Anisotropic textures
are when a filtering process is applied to a texture to change its appearance.
This is commonly used on flat surfaces like the ground to make it look better at shallow angles.
The remainder of the settings delve into more technical aspects of lighting and shadows, some of
which require Unity Pro to use. Lighting and shadows are the keys to excellent visual effects, but
they can be very expensive in terms of performance. For now, here are the sufficient takeaway
points:
1.
The Quality Settings can be used to optimize graphic quality by target
platform and texture resolution, along with lighting and shadows.
2.
Use lightmapping to bake static lighting.
3.
Limit game objects to illumination by one Pixel Light, especially for
mobile devices.
