Object Pooling

This is a continuation of Final Parsec's tutorial series on building a space-themed rail shooter with Unity3d. In this tutorial, I'll be going over how to create a managed object pool. This will allow you to reduce the number of GameObjects that are instantiated and destroyed, thus improving performance.

In this video tutorial, I'll discuss how I created a simple object pool to manage our projectiles and explosions.

A basic implementation would look like this:

public static List pool = new List();
public static GameObject GetObject(Vector3 worldPosition)
{
    GameObject go = null;

    if (pool.Count != 0)
    {
        go = PrefabAccessor.pool[0];
        pool.RemoveAt(0);
    }

    if (go== null)
    {
        go= (Instantiate(objectPrefab, worldPosition, Quaternion.Euler(Vector3.zero)) as GameObject);
    }
    else
    {
        go.transform.position = worldPosition;
    }
    return go;
}

And the code to return the object to the pool would look like this:

void BackInThePool()
{
    transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, -99, transform.position.z);
    pool.Add(this.gameObject);
}

You can follow along with the development of the project and find the source code from the tutorial on GitHub.