Losing Weight on A Unity3D Project
Today is a-nother day.
As the deadline approaches, we've been trying desperately to get rid of the huge ton of fat on our main WebPlayer's waist, as it wasn't totally designed for a web game. Arguably this is quite exciting, to learn the ultimate lesson of game optimization the hard way, but it definitely is not so fun when the progress bar gets stuck.
Unity had this funny little feature / API called Builepipeline.BuildPlayer which allows us to BuildAdditionalStreamedScenes and gain more control against our file size and load timing. We tried and KABLAM! Google Chrome exploded. Doesn't work somehow. Firefox with firebug also dies. Multi-threaded background streaming was never my favorite, at least not as a developer with no stable debugging mechanism taught.
Here's the good news that makes today another day instead of an infinitely looping try-n-error's yet another humble iteration: we got it to work! Turns out although Buildpipeline.BuildPlayer happily accepted our configuration of BuildTarget.WebPlayerStreamed (yeah, streamed, makes sense huh?) plus BuildOptions.BuildAdditionalStreamedScenes, the browsers and web player do not like having a streaming stuff inside another streamed stuff: BuildTarget.WebPlayer works, with or without pushing and popping the dependencies. We just have to wait until the whole thing to download, hopefully not too bad when cached.
Looking back, the Unity script reference never mentioned that we may be able to use BuildTarget.WebPlayerStreamed with the streamed scenes option. Well, it's still likely our fault, hidden somewhere in the codebase, but I'd rather move on to other aspects of life, at least for a couple of days.
