Better alternative to raycast collisions in a 2D platformer?

Like the title says, is there a better way to do collision checking in a 2D platformer other than raycasts? I have a raycast collider detection system set up right now but when I have more than 100 entities on the screen using it, things start getting lagged reeeal fast.

 

The main problem I'm having is I used this platformer tutorial that works off of raycasts for collision detection. It has to do the raycasts in fixedupdate to check for obstacles every time a platformer entity moves and so their movement will be framerate independent. But when I have 100 entities on screen using the raycasting, it results in 21,000 raycasts per frame which is outright ridiculous I think.

 

I have never used 2d in unity, but are you not able to just use a 2d rigidbody and a 2d collider?

So you are doing 210 raycasts per object? What about the 2d boxCast or circle cast? Can you use those instead to try and reduce the amount of casts you need to do?

 

I guess it's 210 raycasts per object when you do it every fixedupdate with 3 raycasts horizontally and 2 vertically. Can you tell me how to do boxcast? That sounds like it might be better than what I'm doing.

 

http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics2D.BoxCast.html
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/physics2d-boxcast-explainer.269199/

I never really used any 2d stuff, so giving you links is all I can do

 

Thanks HiddenMonk. I'll try it out and let you guys know the results for people who stumble on to this looking for an answer.

 

If you are only doing 5 raycasts per object, I dont think the boxcast would be much of a help. If your raycasts dont have a distance set to them, maybe try giving them only distances they would need.
Also, are you sure its the raycasts? Make sure your draw calls are not going up when you have all your objects in the scene. That could be a major frame killer. To see your draw calls go to the stats button on the game tab when you hit play. If it is your draw calls than you will need to look into dynamic batching.
Also make sure your other objects dont have cameras attached to them or something, as I think that might increase the draw calls (or even double it).

 

Well I did a rough version of boxcasters and it actually performed more poorly than with just raycasts. I will look into dynamic batching at any rate.

 

That is what I figured. I thought you were doing 200+ raycasts per object, but then you said only 5.

 

It's probably because fixedupdate makes it jump up to 200+. I'm going to experiment a bit with it some more.