How should I manage large number of object on mobile

What I need:

• A lot of independent bullets
• Run on mobile

What I'm doing:

• Bullet are gameobjects(pooled).
• Each bullet has no component other than Transform.
• Control all bullet from one script => mediocre performance :|

What I'm tried:

• Use struct to store bullet state. Graphics.DrawMesh to display
  • Fast.
  • Bullet meshes can't be batched => thousands of draw calls => Can't use on mobile
• Like above. But use instanced material to draw bullets
  • Faster.
  • But ~60% mobile don't support GPU instancing
• Like 1st. But combine all bullet into one mesh on-the-fly, then DrawMesh only once
  • Only 1 draw call
  • Too high CPU usage

How can I improve the above strategies? What are others options?

 

I abused a ParticleSystem to draw "many of the same things" with one draw-call on mobile.

I used a ParticleSystem simply to render a whole lot of objects at specified positions from game-code. The particle system itself wasn't emitting any particles.

The idea is to use an Particle[] array, update the array with (bullet) positions from your game-code when needed and assign it using ParticleSystem.SetParticles.

This allowed me to render many objects with custom positions (and other attributes such as Color) with one draw-call only.

Not sure if it's faster than what you already tried though.

 

@Le_Tai any improvements? advices? especially mobile?

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Make do with less is what I did. Maybe GPU instancing is better supported after 3 years?