I'm visiting Unite 2024 and wanted to share a high-level overview of the talks I attended and found interesting.

The first one was Making Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

The speakers presented several key ideas, including the importance of automated testing. They specifically mentioned automated performance testing using custom tools built on top of Unity’s provided systems. My favorite was a custom tool called the "performance map reporter," which shows frame times for each location. This tool helps quickly analyze how new content and code changes impact different areas of the game.

Here’s an overview of the key technologies and tools they use:

Unity 2021
A forked URP (Universal Render Pipeline)
Houdini for content design
Extensive use of addressables for streaming
Scriptable Build Pipeline
Bake visible vertices and cull invisible ones to save 40-60% in build size
Custom post-processing stack
Combine procedural geometry into 64k vertices chunks for optimized static batching, reducing draw calls from 2k to 500
For animations, they use Jobs Skinning on the CPU, which provides better performance for them compared to GPU compute skinning
Background animation is baked into textures and animated in the shader
Use of constant buffers instead of uniform constants
Ubershader instead of Shader Graph
Object pooling, avoiding the use of strings

If you're here at Unite too, I'd be happy to meet up. Hit me up in direct messages; my contact is in the channel description.