I used Unity for robotics simulations, and while it was incredible in most ways, it was really heavy. A lot of the scientists involved were working with old computers and the simulator was a little too slow for them.
Perhaps I could have optimized better, but I struggled to find ways to do it. Admittedly, their computers were laughably old and terrible. Building $250k robots and working on under-powered laptops from 2010 or so - I never understood it.
One of the main obstacles that could have helped a lot was reducing mesh complexity. We were working with models directly from Fusion 360 and the meshes were incredibly dense. No one was comfortable deviating from the original models, so interpolating meshes or even manually reducing polygon counts wasn't an option. There was concern that we'd end up losing important data and create inaccurate simulations.
Anyway, it was an incredibly fun project and Unity made it effortless to prototype. It was ultimately built from the ground up using another tool which allowed for much better performance, but Unity allowed us to finish prototyping way, way ahead of schedule.
Perhaps I could have optimized better, but I struggled to find ways to do it. Admittedly, their computers were laughably old and terrible. Building $250k robots and working on under-powered laptops from 2010 or so - I never understood it.
One of the main obstacles that could have helped a lot was reducing mesh complexity. We were working with models directly from Fusion 360 and the meshes were incredibly dense. No one was comfortable deviating from the original models, so interpolating meshes or even manually reducing polygon counts wasn't an option. There was concern that we'd end up losing important data and create inaccurate simulations.
Anyway, it was an incredibly fun project and Unity made it effortless to prototype. It was ultimately built from the ground up using another tool which allowed for much better performance, but Unity allowed us to finish prototyping way, way ahead of schedule.