Getting started

Package Types

World Building

Scripting

Guidelines

Support

Spatial supports multiple platforms which all have different capabilities. In order to get your environment performing well on all supported platforms, you will need to plan carefully where you spend your rendering and memory budgets.

Anything under 500,000 Vertices is a good target to aim for.

This is the total vertex count for all meshes included in the scene.

It is recommended to keep textures under 2048x2048 as an upper bound. You may have larger textures, but the higher you go, the more memory your environment will take up.

Use compression whenever possible.

Texture compression is important because it affects to the environment size the most. And the environment size will affect to the loading time very much. By changing texture compression format, you can easily save up 50~80% of your environment size.

The default is ASTC. We recommend to manually set to ASTC8x8. If it’s 2048x2048, this compression setting change will save 4mb (5.3→1.3mb) per texture! This is for all platform. (Web/Android/iOS)

Rendering transparent textures is expensive, especially in VR. Try to limit the use of these, or at least it is very important not to have the transparent texture fill the entire screen. It is best limited to small particles emitted by unity’s particle systems.

For example: do not stack transparent textures to create a “Fog” effect. Instead, use unity’s built-in fog settings.

We currently don’t limit how many post processing effects you may have in your environment, but as we develop the toolkit we may have to limit its use depending on the platform.

Your scene comes with a default “Global Volume” object. You may use this object to add some post processing effects. Just note that these will only be enabled on higher-end systems.

In order to perform best on a wide range of devices, it is better to opt for baked lighting (also known as Light baking or Light mapping). This pre-calculates lighting and uses an efficient rendering method at run time to render high-quality lighting very cheaply. The downside of “Baked” lighting is that it is “static”. In other words, when objects animate around the scene, the lighting of the scene won’t change.

Mark things that don’t move during play as “Static”, this tells unity that the lighting for these objects in the scene can be fully baked.

Real-Time Lighting: On some devices which meet the system requirements, we will be supporting real time or semi-real-time lighting. This means that the avatar and other dynamic objects in the space will cast a shadow that will blend nicely with the environment.

For more info, visit

Lighting

In order to fit inside the memory budget, your maximum limit is 8 2048 lightmap textures. This is an upper bound, and you should strive to have less than that in order to support the widest ranges of devices. The more light-weight your environment is, the faster it will load.