Scene size differs within game - something major?

ParamirNixon

Hello dear forum!

I noticed a problem within my project a while ago and to be honest, I am not skilled enough to find out if it even matters and if it does, I'm not sure how to fix it.

So what i noticed is, that the levels in our game are of varying sizes. What I mean by that is not just the playerspace being bigger, but basically the scale of a whole scene. In the images you can see 3 levels of our game, commpared to each other:

#1


#2


And you can see in #1 that our Forest level is considerably smaller than the House one.
In #2 you can see that the cliff level is even bigger than the House one.

So this has several implications:
- Scale of Characters is different in each scene
- Size of NavMesh is significantly bigger in some scene, allthough about the same polygon count
- Scale of Prefabs, for example the click marker, have to be adjusted in each scene

So basically the question is do i have to worry about performance issues or even other issues here?
And if I do, how am I supposed to fix this?

The performance of the game is either way lacking at the moment, and it would be my first project to optimize, so I'm really lost in this endeavour.

If further content is needed, like profiling etc, please feel free to ask for it!
I am thankful for any kind of advice and help!

ChrisIceBox

Welcome to the community, @ParamirNixon.

I'm afraid there's no image of the house appearing for me, but I think I understand.

Generally performance isn't tied to the scale of the scene unless you're talking about very large (or very small) numbers.  Your images don't indicate the factor by which your scenes compare, but so long as they're not out by half I shouldn't think it'd be a problem.

However, if you're re-scaling your Click Marker for each scene, is that to have it be the same "percieved" size on-screen?

You shouldn't have to re-scale everything if you don't want to - you can instead just use a Sorting Map to shrink your characters to keep all scenes of equivalent size.  If the camera size / distance matches each scene, you should then be able to avoid re-scaling other prefabs.

So far as performance goes, be sure to upgrade to the latest AC release if you're not already using it, as the recent releases have featured further script optimisations.  The bulk of any optimisation work necessary on a project should now be down to asset management etc, as well as anything covered in the "Performance and optimisation" chapter of the Manual.

ParamirNixon

Thank you for the detailed Answer!

So the size difference is somewhat like:
Forest = 1
House = 1.5
Cliffside = 3

So cliffisde being 3 times as big as the forest scene. But i'm not sure what you mean with "out by half"

yes i do that, so that the click marker seems the same size (especially towards the characters) in each scene.

I'm not sure what you mean with the sorting map. Because i am currently using one in each scene, to:
- first of all, do the necessary sorting
- second, to scale the characters in each scene to appropriate sizes (which are quite different values, bc of the hugely different scene sizes)
Now that you mentioned the sorting maps, actually re-scaling the scenes should get even more difficult, bc i would have to adjust all the sorting maps as well...

I did update to the latest Unity and AC version and that already helped alot with performance, as well as setting up clever unity intern sprite atlases.

for clearence i will provide the links for the images directly:
#1:
https://imgur.com/81UFumU
#2:
https://imgur.com/hST3lKA

but to sum up, it doesn't seem like a big performace issue as of right now. All the scenes seem tu run at similar framerates and memory usages. I'm sorry for the confusion, because it seemed like they we're running differently. But after extensive profiling yesterday (I'm quite dissapointed with unity's internal one) everything seemed alright, performance wise.

But still, since the scenes are scaled differently, they are a hickup each time we use prefabs in several scenes. With the pictures provided now, do you think it is even a good idea to try rescaling them? (it seems like lot of work to me, the levels are almost finished and consist of about 500 Gameobjects each including the scene relevant actionlists though)

I hope somebody can help again

ChrisIceBox

By "out by half", I meant you should be fine if your scene scales are a factor of 0.5 -> 2 relative to one another.  But x3 should be fine, too.

I was already able to see the forest and cliffside images - it's the house that I still can't see.

What do you mean by a hiccup, exactly?  There's not enough info on the actual problem - please elaborate further.

I think there's some mutual confusion here about the scaling situation.  If the camera distance and FOV are equal between each scene, then there shouldn't be a need to dynamically scale prefabs e.g. the click marker, and the only thing that should need scaling are the characters which can be done via the NavMesh.