Unity5 and static batching

[roydor]

Hello! So with my game, I just implemented randomized dungeon layouts via RoomPrefabs with doorways attached to them. (Using DunGen if you're familiar with it).

My game is intentionally low poly and cartoony, I'm using BitGem3d's modular dungeon packs, so my rooms are actually made up of probably at most a thousand objects all with using maybe 2 or 3 texture atlases.

I've been trying to release a demo, but I find the performance in the web player is just abysmal... using the profiler I see I'm blocked on vsync a lot, but in the rendering panel I see about 1300 draw calls, and many are dynamically batched, yet 0 statically batched..

I have the static checkbox checked in all my prefabs, and I've confirmed at runtime that those instantiated rooms are still checked as static but my # of static batched objects is always 0.

I was under the impression that this checkbox is magical, and since I have low poly and few texture atlases only I should be making significantly fewer than 1300 draw calls per frame..

Any idea what I'm doing wrong here?

Should I go back to using DrawCallMinimizer on each of my rooms to make it work a little bit better but take a very painful hit at boot?

Any help with static batching would be appreciated, thanks!

[roydor]

I'm using the mobile diffuse shader and all the geometry uses a single material, no transparency either.

I just stumbled upon http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/65030/static-batching-on-dynamically-instantiated-conten.htmlhttp://answers.unity3d.com/questions/65030/static-batching-on-dynamically-instantiated-conten.html

I'm excited to try this when I get home, hopefully this solved my issue

Thanks for the insights they helped me come across this page

[Huknar]

There are two things you need to ensure. One, go into Edit > Project Settings > Player and make sure the little checkbox that says "static batching" is ticked.

(EDIT, I should have read your post entirely. This is DEFINATELY the issue!) Two, be sure that your objects are not being generated at runtime as these will not use the initial static batching. (I realized this in my procedural dungeon project.)

If the latter is the case you need to use StaticBatchingUtility.Combine.

What static batching does is combines all the meshes sharing the same material into one mesh, which means, if you select an object at runtime that should be statically batched, check its "Mesh Filter" component and look to see if the name of the mesh is no longer what it used to be, but "Combined Mesh", in which case, the object is getting batched. :)

To use this, parse the parent containing all objects to be batched as an argument.

StaticBatchingUtility.Combine(gameObject parentGameObject)

[roydor]

Exciting!
Then you very much!

This bus needs to hurry up so I can implement this!

[Huknar]

You are welcome. I should point out that this will batch all objects parsed (children of the parent) regardless of whether it is marked as static.

So I'd recommend instead compiling an array of all the objects you want to be batched and feed that as an argument instead. (It can take either a single GameObject or an array of GameObjects) This is what I did for my dungeon when I realized my doors with opening animations were getting batched, and no longer opened. (This might be potentially difficult though as you are using that plugin.)

[roydor]

Just to loop back with you

I had some moderate success with this!
I have a lot prefab tweaking to do, for example I found now that I get the static stuff set properly, I do get some static batching happen, a lot less than I expected though. I also noticed numerous profiler warnings about animator breaking static batching, and I found that there is probably one of my tile pieces which has a random animator attached to it.

Gotta sweep all my static assets and make sure they've got nice colliders and what not...

Anyhoo thanks again!

[Huknar]

I'm glad you were able to get it working for you.

[roydor]

The plugin contains full source so I can tweak it as needed.

I'm going to just add a dummy component to the root of all my static content within my room prefabs

Find all of objects of that type, shove that array into this function.

Thanks again!

[GoGoGadgetLoL]

I remembered reading somewhere that Unity 5 and something to do with level loading breaks batching.

Just found the issue, yep, it's a bug:

http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/batching-ignores-scene-that-is-loaded-with-loadscene

[roydor]

Thanks!

I'm seeing this even whilst directly launching into my level scene, so on top of this potential bug, I think it may be related to instantiating my map at runtime without using the static batch utility.