Performance: Multiple asset references vs. One public asset reference

Question

I am making a dungeon crawler where each room can spawn its own enemies. Right now I need a way to reference the enemy prefabs. One way of doing it is by having the references on the room script, like this:

 public class Room : MonoBehaviour
 {
     [Header("Enemies")]
     [SerializeField] Enemy enemy1;
     [SerializeField] Enemy enemy2;
     [SerializeField] Enemy enemy3;
     // etc..
 }

Another way of doing it is by having a static AssetHolder class that has all references that can be queried like so:

 AssetHolder.Enemy1Prefab

I honestly prefer the first one in terms of code (one less class, better structured) but I want to ask which one is better in terms of memory usage and performance.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Answer by AaronBacon · Aug 20, 2021 at 10:40 AM

Technically, static variables are more memory heavy than local variables, but in this use case, with just a few enemies, it really won't make any difference. Generally, the main things that affect performance are spawning or destroying large amounts of objects, as well as obviously having a lot of unoptimized objects in camera view, like high poly models.

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Answer 2

Answer by joan_stark · Aug 24, 2021 at 07:21 PM

If what you are looking for is a way to reference different type of enemies, I would create a scriptable object that have references to all enemy types, and then you create a variable that holds this scriptable object. Scriptable object will only create a unique instance across all rooms so it will be performance friendly, and also it will be a clean way to look for prefabs and no static classes.

Also, 100% sure you will need a Singleton class that controlls some logic of the game, so maybe you can reference the scriptable object there, and access it fastly with the singleton class.

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Performance: Multiple asset references vs. One public asset reference

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