How to optimize rendering of many identical objects?

Question

Unity

Hello. Once I played the game "count masters" and decided to do something similar.

After I made it, it was time to build and I saw a great game in the form of a slideshow)
I got into the profiler and realized that the main load comes from drawing the little men themselves (the models were downloaded from the Internet), I thought that the models have a lot of polygons, I asked a 3D friend to make me the simplest models of such little men, he made them for me, but the problem is not left, I asked to make it even easier, but he said "Only triangles can be easier instead of arms, legs, etc." =) My first thought was that the game is lying about the number of people in the circle, I counted them and it turned out that there are as many as there should be , then I thought that this game was probably not made on unity at all, I unpacked the ref build and it turned out that it was still on unity. But how did they do it? The reference game gives out stable 30fps with 300 people on the stage, and my little people (which are not triangles) are 15-30, while they are on a clean stage, no animations etc. They have one material on them, they are batched. But maybe there is some trick, or paid assets that help solve this problem, maybe it's a shader in general? It's very interesting how they did it.

Answer 1

First, see how many triangles are drawn in runtime, you can see this in the game window by clicking the status button, like, then if everything is fine, then how do you move the little men? If in physics, then it can eat up a huge chunk of performance if a bunch of objects rub and try to squeeze into each other, then if you can’t do without physics, then you can try havok, I haven’t tried it, but if you’re interested, read the last transition to ecs, good luck

Answer 2

https://habr.com/ru/post/314306/ optimization article.
https://www.sites.google.com/site/rusewyl/grafika/... An article with a solution specifically to this problem.