Optimize particle system performance on mobile

[Khorino]

So, we're using the default particle system by Unity. The thing is they are too heavy and are causing the game to be unplayable because of slowdowns. Is there any optimization that can be made, with or without help of 2D Toolkit? Or use 2DTK for some tricks and get the same visual effects? By the way, we tested on iPhone 3GS and we plan to do it on Android as well.

[fsadeq]

What particle effects are you trying to achieve? I'm using Shuriken with no performance issues at all.

[Khorino]

We're using Shuriken too, for various different effects. We already optimized a little bit, but if possible, we want even more to use more things on a level.

[unikronsoftware]

@Khorino - that is a really open ended question, and there really isn't a generic answer to it. How you can simplify this really depends on a whole bunch of things, but one option is to "bake" the particles into a sprite animation. The multi atlas demo is an example of this. You can create that explosion using particles, but here, it is baked into one animation sequence.

With a bit of creativity - baking + real particles, you can greatly increase the number of particles you can push around.

[Khorino]

Thank you for this answer!