In this session, Sophia Clarke, a software engineer in Unity's Release QA team, will explain the advantages of using 2D Tilemaps for creating mobile games. You'll leave the session knowing what Tilemaps are and when to use them, and also get an overview of the workflow, best practices for working with textures, and how to optimize performance. If you're new to Tilemaps, or if you've used Tilemaps before but would like to learn some best practices for mobile, this talk will be useful to you. Sophia Clarke - Unity Technologies

1. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Advantages of
Tilemaps for
Mobile
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2. Sophia Clarke
Software Engineer, Release QA
@sophiaaar
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3. What we’ll cover
• Tilemaps Overview
• Why you should optimize for Mobile
• Advantages of using Tilemaps over
traditional Sprites
• Workflow
• Performance
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4. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Tilemaps Overview
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5. What are Tilemaps?
• The 2D Tilemap feature is made up of grids,
tiles, brushes, and palettes
• Unity 2017.2 onwards
• Quickly create 2D levels
• Paint 2D sprites directly onto your scene
• Square, Hexagonal, Isometric
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6. 6

7. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/2d-

8. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/2d-

9. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Demo
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10. Grid
Tilemap
Palette
Tiles
Brush
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11. Why should you use Tilemaps?
• Workflow
• Great for artists
• Performance
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12. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Mobile Performance
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13. Why optimize for mobile?
• Market of phones is really varied
• Need a small build size
• Don’t have much RAM to use
⭐ A good rule of thumb is to use one third of
the available RAM on your worst device
• Measure using worst iOS device
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14. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Tilemap Performance
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15. Fewer GameObjects
• Tilemaps result in the scene having fewer
GameObjects
• This improves:
• Load times
• Memory usage
• CPU usage
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16. Scene size
• Fewer GameObjects and Components means
fewer objects to load from disk, deserialize
and keep in memory at runtime
⭐ Deserialization is the process
transforming data from one format to
another.
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17. 17

18. 30,000
Lines in a Unity scene
file using Tilemaps
370,000
Lines in a Unity scene
file using Sprites
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19. 831 KB
File size of a scene
using Tilemaps
10 MB
File size of a scene
using Sprites
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20. Renderer Overhead
• Each renderer has its own CPU overhead
• Each Sprite in a scene has a Sprite Renderer
component
• A Tilemap has only one Tilemap Renderer per
tilemap
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21. Batching
• Batching is gathering all of the geometry that can
be drawn without doing another SetPass call
• TilemapRenderer batches the geometry of the
sprites based on position
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22. 157
Batches in a scene
using Tilemaps
1930
Batches in a scene
using Sprites
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23. 13ms
Frame time of a scene
using Tilemaps
244ms
Frame time of a scene
using Sprites
Measured on an iPhone 7
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24. 21 MB
Memory (RAM) usage
of a scene using
Tilemaps
1.1 GB
Memory (RAM) usage
of a scene using
Sprites
Measured on an iPhone 7
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25. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Texture Settings
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26. Mipmaps
• More efficient on GPU when textures are drawn
far away
• Increases the size (in memory and on disk) by
33%
• You should have these disabled when using
Tilemaps
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27. Read/Write
• When Read/Write is true, you have two copies
of that texture in memory
• Texture2D aTexture = new Texture2D(); has
Read/Write on by default
⭐ Use aTexture.Apply(updateMipMaps, true);
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28. Conclusion
• Nicer workflow for devs and artists
• Performance benefits
• Quicker load times
• Smaller file size
• Better runtime performance
• Remember standard rules for textures
• Mipmaps and read/write OFF
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29. GenerativeArt–MadewithUnity
Sophia Clarke
Software Engineer, Release QA
@sophiaaar
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