Watch This Before Working on a Big Game in Unity 

And now i have a question, what’s a big game ?

When using a game with a large open world: keep in mind the problems with float imprecision. If your camera gets away more than like 2000 units from the origin, animations can start to flicker and shake. Look up various methods of "origin shifting" to solve that problem by moving the scene dynamically closer to the origin point.

I think one of the biggest hurdles (atleast for me) working with larger projects is to say "no" to things I want to have in the game. There is usually sooo much that I want to add to the game, there is a need to mash all those idéas into doable tasks.

Me making a 2D tic tac toe game: "Ah yes this is relevant to me"

Even five minutes into the video, I could barely believe how densely packed this video is with useful information. Thank you for this great video.

This is quality content. Well done. It's so hard to find topics about big projects with Unity. I hope you continue to share your knowledge.

This is very good content. I would love that video on an Event system.

This video is amazing. On RU-vid the most of the videos about Unity are good enough for beginners or intermediate, but there aren't too many videos about these complex topics. I think that if you could create some videos about coding a big game it should be fantastic! Thanks again for the video

Haha nice message on the end! I’m developing a bus simulator for about five years, there are a lot of things that we learn the hard way haha. I abandoned ProBuilder because some updates broke some of my models. Huge games on Unity will suffer from another problem: the lack of precision on world coordinates. After 10km or so from the origin things will get broken, shadows appear blinking, too much jitter on smaller objects etc. The most common solution is moving everything back to keep the camera near the 0,0,0 position. Unreal Engine 4 includes a setting for that, on Unity there is a great open code called “Floating Origin”. But performance may be bad if there are tons of rigidbodies. I can’t wait to test a custom compiled version of Unreal Engine 5 with 64-bit coordinates. But I’m procrastinating on that.

this is really good content, this type of information is kind of hard to find when you encounter an issue related to them, so it's really beneficial to know them before you encounter these issues, just having the knowledge that a solution exists for a certain problem will save a lot of time when you encounter them. game devs really need someone like you, keep it up I think your the next Brackeys

Heyho, Game Dev here for Unity. I do a lot of profiling, and we are using Renderdoc. Its an extremely important tool as you can link it to Unity and grab Frames to analyze. It is similar to the Frame Debugger, but much much more indepth. When we started optimizing we were constantly checking our builds, and with Renderdoc we removed about 1/3 of GPU overhead already. One important topic to mention from GPU sides are shaders, lights, shadows and texture sizes. But thats probably a whole other video as well. Great Job otherwise. Grüße

Interesting topic, good to see more videos about it. I think there are more aspects to it, but these are def. some important ones. The part about the navmesh volumes was awesome, I didn't know about that! There is something for GPU/shader analysing too, the Frame Debugger, where you can step through separate draw calls and such.

Videos like these are legendary and must saves. This talks about many things you don't often hear about in 99% Game Dev videos. And it was purely knowledge, and no bull shit.

I would greatly appreciate another video on the event system you mentioned and a more in-depth look at organizing code for a complex game like that. Excellent video btw.

Thanks for this content! There is a lot of content about making demos and for beginners of Unity, but really lack content like yours about how to build complex systems and larger project! Subscribed!

Thank you for teaching about the material override. I had no idea that was a thing and makes things SO much better than having to create another material instance when I just need a slightly different material.

Thank you for the video! Would absolutely love to see more vids from you

Some real helpful things to consider here, even though I personally don't intend to make a "big" project and instead focus on smaller contained maps myself, keeping all these things in mind is still important and good practice. Will subscribe and look out for more helpful vids from you. :D

This video was such a relieving change of pace, I instantly subscribed.

I guess it goes without saying, but if you want to make a big complicated game, you need to be knowledgeable about game development, intelligent, and experienced. Too many inexperienced developers have big dreams of making big games that will be the next [insert open world game here]. I'm 36 now, and I've been doing this since I was about... 15. At this point in my life, I'm more than just a "jack of all trades, master of none," I know most aspects of game development on a deep level. I'm a jack of all trades and master of many of those trades. When I set out to make a big complicated game, the planning phase is monumentally important. I need to plan what the game looks like structurally before I place a single cube down in Unity. I need to have an idea of what the data will be structured like, I need to figure out if I'm going to use virtual texturing, HDRP, URP, how I'm going to pack my textures, what kind of audio fidelity is needed, what the art style needs to be to suit my aesthetic and performance desires, decide how modern the game will be and how that will affect how many people will be able to run it (will I be making a game with baked lighting? Am I making a very modern game that uses no baked lighting and uses ray tracing features exclusively? Is there a level of dynamism in the game that it even warrants real time lighting?)... There's a lot to consider, and if you're only a couple years into game development you might not even be aware of what questions to ask and what to consider, let alone how to consider it. As far as optimization, in my experience I've come to realize that rather than "don't optimize until you need to," time and experience will teach you what optimizations can be done in all kinds of situations, and you should carry those optimizations into EVERY project you do. Because if you optimize (and PLANNED!) your game all along, you won't have to after it's done which can lead to soul-crushing code refactors and bugs on the tail end of your development.

This is golden information. Keep these things in mind any time when doing any FP game that has any asynchronous loading

This is an amazing video - thanks! Would be interesting to see you go into more details on some of the techniques you mention, like the events system. These optimization videos are great 👍

Amazin video, thank you so much for working on this, it is so hard to find actual intermediate/advance topics about Unity. Loved it!

That's why its best to use mixed lighting (baked on some areas & realtime on others)

Great explanation and I learned a lot from this video. Would love to see more content, e.g. the event system you mentioned

video was really great but it was totally overshadowed by the genius of the outro, keep it up

Really nice video! Taught me some stuff I didn´t really think about.

Finally "advanced" tips. Thank you so much, those are really helpful!

Simple, accurate, appreciated. Thank you.

Very informative video in a concise format, great! I'd also love a video or two about Coding for a Big Game. Keep it up!

This is a 10 years of experience and knowledge compressed into a single video. Would be great to see the video about code optimization!

I would love to see more videos like these as well as more in-depth content on the coding and planning side of things. Event System sounds good. I'd also maybe like to see some dedicated videos on the topics you discussed here that go more in-depth.

occlusion culling and static batching saved my game. Occlusion has a lot of hiccups but I'm glad I figured it out.

Man these are such knowledge BOMBS! I'm making a small to medium-sized 3D project and a lot of what you said applies! Also you nailed that outro

Great stuff I’m helping my friend with his open world game and I have never made a large game before, glad to know there is nothing too complicated that I didn’t already know.

This is insanely helpful! Thank you so much

Very pog content, I actually took notes for the first time lol, the video about coding for complex games would be great!

Very very informative video, I would love to see what you got more

Bloody brilliant content, thanks for uploading and looking forward to more insights in your future videos

Very useful content. Thank you and your patrons :)

I would really like to see a video diving more into the event manager and organizing your code. Great video, you held my attention the whole time and earned my subscription. Keep up the great work!

Great video, you earned my sub :) I would love to see the video on Even System. Can’t wait xD

Definitely interested in learning more about coding systems! Great video mate

Great video John!

This was really helpful, thank you a lot! I would really appreciate the "coding big games" video in the future.

This is very informative, Thank you, great content!

This was very informative. Thank you for the video!

Subscribed for this video, well done!❤

That's really awsome, no one ever talk about large games, I literally learn many things and realize i was wrong about many things

I saved your video for future reference. Please make more videos on large-scale game development, these are hard to find.

One of the best Unity videos I saw. Unfortinaly I had to learn some of those lessons the hard way, cause this topic isn't covered enough.

Please make more such quality content if you get some time it is very helpful for newbies like me (learning unity currently and will join company soon) this helps alot to understand many situation and stuff.

Yes please! I would love to see some videos about structuring performant code for large games...particularly the usage of ECS for batching groups of scenery into subscenes and using DOTS graphics.

You deserve all the subs, Thank you

You made my day ... started to use an event system to pass paramaters from scene A to Scene B ... but giving a Unique ID its a way cleaner option!

Great video! +1 for Event Systems. There can never be enough videos about single-responsibility and modularity in development. Please talk about how powerful event systems can work in different game types and how interdependencies can cause nightmares.

Subscribed to see that event system!

Awesome video with fantastic information. Thank you so much for making this ❤️

Thanks for the insights! Outro made me instantly like&sub. :)

Very amazing video. More pls)

walls arround cities is good for 2 reasons. 1)you dont have to render the city if you are distant from it, as you said. 2)you dont have to render everything outside the city if you are inside it.

Amazing video, thank you so much. Subscribed in the hope that you'll put out a coding/event system video 😁

Great advice! I'd love to get a more in-depth discussion about a central communication hub as suggested in your video.

Thats some top tier video. Straight to the point. I will pray youtube algorithms for you my friend. Thanks a lot for great video

Golden video. Share more experience on loading/unloading regions of big world please

This was a really great video. I’ve only now started to dabble in unity. I don’t want to make a huge open world, something more sizable, but I’m a junkie for optimization and figuring out how to make things better. Really enjoyed the points you brought here, I’ve spent most of last night googling about them and learning alternatives lol😊

Great video. That ending make me chuckle hard lol.

Good tips , other things i would add are things like : -caching , if you can cache somthing then fking do it , and if you can reuse an item then do it , i've seen a lot of codebases that had stuff (especially in ui code ) like "if something changed then destroy all UIs/objects and rebuild from scratch" , don't be lazy , react to changes accordingly instead of "rePaInT aLL" on every slight change -speaking of UI , only make interactable the things that matter and disable "raycast target" and "maskable" on eveything by default , i actually made an editor script that does that automatically. -if you can bake or precalculate something in editor or a loading screen then do it, try to take as much work off the game during runtime. -if you are running into a bottleneck with stuff executed in update , try to avoid branching by using a jump table or reformatting the data in a way where you can put it i an array and index into it directly. -if you can express logic with an array lookup , do it - the more generic a solution , the more you account for stuff that you probably wont run into and will just be useless overhead , try to make your solutions as domain specific as possible - if there's a task you can automate or make an editor for then do it , your futur self will help you. -unity can be a really dumb engine that would rather give you a straight forward solution/answer but keep the performance overhead/consequences hidden , do the extra digging .pooling I can keep typing on and on but i am too tired rn , hope this helps tho

The ending by listing your pateron error codes has me dead in my chair. LOL Very well done video! Thank you for the tips!

Oh yeah, I'd Definitely want to know more about event systems!

First-time visitor and I love your intro.

thank you for the video, soo much info in a single video.....When will the code architecture video is coming out ?

I think that, for baked lighting and especially in the example you were showing, that you can split your game into rooms and bake those rooms. You could also create a scene dedicated to this room just to bake stuff or cheking and verifying how everything in this room plays. You could also, I think, develop the room on its own scene so that you can navigate in your environment. I think this particular point was brought up during the Editor Performance video chapter, but I think that adding the tip that you could bake lightings per room or divisions and only rely on realtime lightings on light sources that could span in multiple rooms or object groups. I find the optimising part of a game as interesting as it is crucial. My current computer was made in 2014 and was an average gaming build at the time (meaning a good machine in the broader PC configs) but it's starting to feel less and less powerful for more recent games... especially with indie games. It may seem weird that indie games are harder on the hardware than AA or AAA games. But I think that's even more logical. Big game studios theoretically have more budget to optimise. While indie studios aren't even aware of the performance issues, or do not care enough. I have a will to make my games more accessible to more modest PC configurations, so optimisation is a very important topic to me. My computer can still handle gamedev because of the "extra mile" my friend invested into the CPU at the time. To be honest, when I am downloading the one map demo of an indie game that in itself weighs 12+ GB, I internally suffer. One, because even if my download speed is good, I think that there are still many many gamers that have a less powerful bandwidth. Two, because I know that, even in lower graphic settings, it will most likely have performance issues and few optimisations to offer. It's a general feeling I have and it may be exagerated, but I feel like most of those indie demos would really deserve more optimisations.

Great video! I'd love to see a video on Big Game Coding systems

Fantastic video, I hope Thomson sees this.

+1 for an event system, great video!

This is one of the best videos. Bravo

great video, still new to all this but very informative.

"Writing code for a complex game" - yes please. Great video, would love to see more in-depth content from you.

Great video dude!

I'd also recommend looking into texture compression like crunch compression, especially for things like roughness/metalic maps (where you can also reduce the resolution) where the compression is less visible, or masks for special shaders. But generally crunch compression for everything but hero objects won't have an obvious visual reduction. And as a result can take a 10GB game down to like 1GB. Also with URP and HDRP it's ideal to have as few shaders as possible.

Very well presented information and the Patreon bit at the end killed me haha

great video, this is really helpful. Thank you

Loved the video!

Super good video. Love the detailed advice!

great video. I hope you will doing some more

Thank you for the video, lots of great information for anyone making a large game.

That's Amazing information! I'll be rewatching this several times. Interesting that Occusion culling is not effective in large scenes

Smart talk. Fascinating!

Lol the patreon list at the end killed me hahaha, good video man, keep them coming.

I have very little experience with game development, but I do have some experience with other things such as web programming, and always have had an interest in complex systems and understanding game performance. This was a very interesting video even though I don't really plan to make any sort of big game. It is very cool to learn that a lot of techniques are quite manual and rely on the developer to manually write them for the game. This is also reassuring and great to hear in case I do make my own games or even content for other games like VRChat which use Unity. I always have wanted to dig through a performance profiler of many of the games I play to find possible performance improvements. Great video!

What an excellent Video !!

Nice, you made some real good points. KISS being one of them.

This sounds like I'm in the advanced section of game making. Sounds very useful for folks at a high level in game creation. I'm heading back to the basics department.

Amazing informative video. We'd like more info about this subject. Big open world games, RPG systems, stream loading, big terrains, scene loading etc. Thanks!

Thank you, helped a lot!

Thank you for the tips!

It is hard to find in youtube videos about actual production/commercial-quality projects. There is a lot of tutorial for beginners but not so much content for solving "real world" problems like these. Hoping to watch more videos like this one.

Wow man... Thank you very much for sharing.

Great video, thanks man