Many instances of a small script, or reference to objects in one master script?

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Hi to all!

Here's my use case, but the question is more general:

In my scene, I have 100 instances of a sprite. All sprites already hold an instance of SpriteScript (detecting touch). Now, which is better, both performance wise and coding wise (app is for iPad):

1) To expand SpriteScript with other sprite related functions (i.e. move there, scale, calculate position, etc..) Consequence : many instances of a larger script

2) To send all needed info from sprite to a SpriteController script, which references all sprites? Consequence: keeps the sprite script small, but more coding and more difficult to maintain.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

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Answer by Bunny83 · Jun 26, 2012 at 10:43 AM

If a script or class contains a lot of code, it doesn't matter how many instances you have of that script. The code for a class only exists once. Member variables are eating up memory since they exists on every instance. It might be a little bit faster to handle everything in one script and loop through your instances, but in most cases that's neglectable.

It's by far more important to optimise the rendering. Hopefully you already use some kind of sprite-toolkit that batch them into one drawcall.

Unless you have real problems with the performance of code execution, just code logical. In OOP a class is written to serve one specific task.

If you have Unity pro, you can check the cpu usage for all modules in the profiler. Unless you have big hiccups in the code section keep the classes seperated ;)

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gregzo · Jun 26, 2012 at 10:48 AM 0

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There! Thanks for the detailed reply. Using NGUI, can't believe I did without for so long... 1 draw call in my scene, yippee! Plus all the goodies that come with it.

Cheers, Gregzo

AlucardJay · Jun 26, 2012 at 11:03 AM 0

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$$anonymous$$any Thanks (making my own meshes and swapping uvs on the verts).

So to confirm, a class on each instance is only lagging everything by the amount of vars (public and private) times number of instances. And so including an Update function and/or with detecting touch inputs is also negligable?

Bunny83 · Jun 26, 2012 at 11:24 AM 0

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Well, of course every function call cost a little bit performance, but it's really not that much. $$anonymous$$ember variables doesn't really influence the performance in the sense of speed, they only eat up memory ;)

AlucardJay · Jun 26, 2012 at 11:38 AM 0

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Thanks again. Self-taught so sometimes ter$$anonymous$$ology is lost on me. I also now see the difference and considerations for performance (FPS) and memory (memory usage, number of apps running etc)

Many instances of a small script, or reference to objects in one master script?

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