Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Avoiding recursive Particle System calls

Many methods available to a ParticleSystem component are recursive calls. Calling them will iterate through each child of the Particle System, which then calls GetComponent<ParticleSystem>() on each child, and, if the component exists, it will call the appropriate method. This then repeats for each child ParticleSystem beneath the original parent, its grandchildren, and so on. This can be a huge problem with deep hierarchies of Particle Systems, which is sometimes the case with complex effects.

There are several ParticleSystem API calls affected by this behavior, such as Start(), Stop(), Pause(), Clear(), Simulate(), and isAlive(). We obviously cannot avoid these methods entirely since they represent ...