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Benchmarking Unity-DOTS Online Procedural Terrain Generation approaches
2022 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

Content is an important factor in games. To develop content demands time and resource not every designer has. The problems can be evaded through procedural content generation. This thesis primarily focuses on generating terrains that could be used as landscapes in games. This research is accomplished using Unity’s DOTS which is a collection of packages that is applied to the Unity game engine. Through using Unity-DOTS developers can write multithreaded high performant code in a user-friendly fashion. Unity’s documentation is sometimes unclear regarding how certain methods are to be utilized and the benefits. In this paper a formal experiment was conducted with a variety of treatments applied to a procedural terrain generation system to observe which treatments provide significant improvements. Measurements were made of the time the CPU spent updating the terrain with new heights. The system’s time was also measured when treatments were individually applied to the system. The recorded data with and without treatments was examined for significant improvements. The result of this paper is practical for developers to realize how procedural terrain generation may be implemented or as potential upgrades to similar systems. This may also be used by researchers that want to execute similar experiment to examine the impact on their systems. The results indicate that using fast floating-point optimization setting on a job provides significant improvement in performance and is the second-best result. The third best result is the treatment that replaced the SetVertices method that applies the calculated vertices to a mesh with the SetVertexBufferData method which use is generally the same. The highest performance was observed when using a compute shader that relieves the CPU from most of the work and is instead executed on the GPU. The CPU however is dispatching the compute shader and updating values on the GPU but the time it took to execute was brief. To conclude, this paper analyzes treatments that can be applied to procedural terrain generation systems to observe which treatments that provide significant performance improvements. This research can for example be used by developers of similar systems to identify where improvements might be possible.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022. , p. 24
Keywords [en]
Unity, DOTS, Performance testing, Data oriented design, Procedural Terrain Generation, Procedural Content Generation
National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-80410OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-80410DiVA, id: diva2:2012397
Educational program
TS Spelutveckling
Supervisors
Available from: 2025-11-07 Created: 2025-11-07 Last updated: 2025-11-07Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
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  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
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  • nn-NO
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