I’m diving deep into a project where I’m generating a 2D procedural terrain using a ton of Tile GameObjects, and I ran into some performance issues. The game is supposed to be infinite, and to keep it performing well, I’m dynamically loading and unloading chunks based on the player’s position and a variable render distance. The catch is that these chunks consist of tons of individual squares, and creating or destroying hundreds—if not thousands—of GameObjects at once is causing serious lag.
At first, I thought the solution was as simple as making the loading functions asynchronous, allowing them to run alongside the main thread without halting everything. But after implementing that, nothing seems to generate! Through debugging, I realized that the function hangs when it tries to create the GameObject. It looks like Unity isn’t thread-safe, which complicates things.
So, to address this, I created a UnityMainThreadDispatcher. This worked for loading a single chunk, but when it comes to loading the tiles within that chunk, I hit another wall. The whole async model feels tricky and confusing—especially when I’m trying to track down what’s faulty since the process isn’t straightforward.
I have a few other ideas like using coroutines, but they still hit the main game loop too hard, and there’s no way to use object pooling effectively since this world generation needs to be limitless.
I’m really hoping someone can share some wisdom or tips on getting this working without the hiccups. I’ve posted snippets of my code including the ChunkManager, Chunk class, and the dispatcher for context. If you’ve faced something similar or have any thoughts on how to optimize this, I’d love to hear your ideas!
Sounds like you’re really diving into a challenging project! Generating infinite terrain with Tile GameObjects is exciting, but I totally get the performance hurdles you’re facing.
First off, it’s a bummer about the threading issues! Unity’s not being thread-safe can really mess things up when you try to run async code. Your approach with the
UnityMainThreadDispatcherwas a smart move, but I see how loading many tiles at once can still grind things to a halt.Instead of creating or destroying tons of GameObjects all at once, have you thought about chunking your tile creation into smaller batches? This way, you can spread out the load over several frames. You could do something like:
IEnumerator LoadTiles(Chunk chunk) { for (int i = 0; i < chunk.tiles.Length; i++) { // Create the GameObject for tile CreateTile(chunk.tiles[i]); if (i % tilesPerFrame == 0) { yield return null; // Wait until the next frame } } }This batch-loading approach might help keep your frames smooth while still loading up your world.
Another idea is to explore using a grid-based approach where you only instantiate tiles that are within a certain distance from the player and maybe reuse already loaded tiles when they exit the view. This way, you can minimize the number of GameObjects active at a time.
If object pooling is something that’s tough to implement in an infinite world, consider pooling tiles that have already been created and are no longer in view, then move them back into view as needed. It can be tricky, but it might save you some serious performance.
Coroutines can be good too, but if they still hit the main game loop too hard, think about using a combination of coroutines to yield control batch by batch or even using a job system if you get deeper into performance optimization down the line.
Hope these ideas give you a good starting point! Good luck, and feel free to share your code snippets if you want more specific help!
You’re right that Unity’s main thread limitations complicate asynchronous object creation—Unity’s API is largely not thread-safe, forcing instantiation, destruction, and component modifications to occur on the main thread. To efficiently handle large-scale procedural generation while maintaining performance, a common solution is to combine chunk-based management with object pooling. Instead of instantiating and destroying hundreds or thousands of tile GameObjects repeatedly, pre-instantiate a fixed pool of tiles (just enough to fill your viewport plus some buffer), then update their positions and visuals as the player moves around. This keeps your tile count static, relieves the CPU of heavy loading spikes due to frequent object creation/destruction, and significantly reduces garbage collection overhead.With infinite terrain, you don’t need infinite GameObjects—just a reusable set that shuffles around dynamically as needed.
If you’re still worried about lag spikes from repositioning or updating visuals in a single frame, combine your pooling with coroutines or batch updates spread over multiple frames; this approach smoothens performance dips. Leverage a chunk-based system where each chunk only stores tile information like IDs or types. Then, rather than instantiating new objects every time, your pool of tiles simply references and dynamically loads visuals from this discrete chunk data when reaching that area. This hybrid solution—static pool combined with coroutines or gradual updates—helps maintain steady framerates and efficiently manages large, infinite procedural worlds without encountering your current lagging issues.