koobas.hobune.stream
Unity Terrrain editor halves FPS on IOS?
Hey, we are making a physics based 3D racing'ish game for IOS (target: 3GS+).
Resume: Previously we made our maps as a 3D mesh with a single texture stretched out on it. With the support of Terrain on IOS since summer, we wan't to shift to that. We have made a map, which was a replica of a map made "in the old way". It functions on the Iphone and looks great visually.
Problem: It looks great on Iphone, but it kills the framerate to like 50% of our old approach (10-15 compared to 25-30). Our settings is mostly the lowest they go, regarding terrain "resolution", "pixel errors" and "LOD". But we cant get above 10-15 FPS
We have even tried removing the texture, the props, the background (advanced skybox) and only have the white "terrain mesh" that we drive around in. -which only give like +1-3 fps.
Is our script / physics / car-code colliding with the terrain-rendering-and-collision-detection in some way? OR Is the support for the terrain editor on IOS only "theoretically" as it gives really poor performance?
No, that's the terrain itself. On Android the same, HTC Desire, empty scene with Terrain = 15-20 fps. Empty scene without terrain: 60 fps.
Terrain is still very slow on lower devices. I assume Terrain was added with the new, dual-core or Tegra devices in mind who have better computing & graphic capabilities.
Currently, there is no way around making the terrain by hand if you wanna support lower end devices (including iPhone4. Just the iPhone4 added Dual-Core CPU)
edit: You can of course improve the performance a little by selecting the terrain, going to the terrain preferences (right most button in the Inspector) and increase the "Pixel Error". Default is 5. If you increase it to 40, the draw calls for the terrain drop significantly, but it only increases the fps little (from 15 to ~30 for me on HTC Desire) on an empty scene. With other stuff, it probably will drop in the unplayable area.
You really can't use Unity Terrain yet, if you don't want exclude 95% of all Smartphone users
