prompter: Hello I am designing a game and it is already pretty fun to play. Users on good computers report that the game is a lot of fun. although users on older PC's and laptops report the game is lagging and stuttering and the loading times are long. each time they enter a house and when they exit a house loading times are 15-20 seconds. when observing a tester I noticed he tries to avoid entering homes or shops as much as possible to avoid loading times.
The game was made in unity. it is single-player 3D  and plays in a single city with loading zones for each house. If I want to increase the quantity of people having fun in the game what should be done?

assistant: Hi there! It's great to hear that your game is already fun to play for users with good computers. To make it more enjoyable for users with older PCs and laptops, you should consider optimizing the game performance and reducing loading times. Here are some suggestions:

1. **Optimize assets and textures**: Reduce the texture size and polygon count of your 3D models, especially for objects that are not crucial to the gameplay. This can help reduce the memory usage and improve performance on lower-end devices.

2. **Use Level of Detail (LOD) techniques**: Implement LOD to display lower quality models and textures when objects are farther away from the camera. This can help improve performance by reducing the number of polygons being rendered.

3. **Optimize scripts and code**: Review your scripts and code to identify any bottlenecks or performance issues. Use Unity's built-in Profiler to analyze the performance of your game and pinpoint areas that need improvement.

4. **Use Occlusion Culling**: Enable Occlusion Culling to prevent rendering objects that are not visible to the camera. This can help reduce the amount of rendering work and improve performance.

5. **Optimize lighting and shadows**: Use baked lighting and simplified shadow settings to reduce the performance impact of lighting and shadows on lower-end devices.

6. **Asynchronous loading and scene management**: Instead of loading the entire house or shop scene at once, consider using asynchronous loading to load assets in the background while the player is still in the main city scene. This can help reduce the apparent loading times and provide a smoother experience.

7. **Consider adding a settings menu**: Provide players with an option to adjust the graphics settings, such as texture quality, shadow quality, and draw distance, to better suit their hardware capabilities.

By implementing these optimization techniques, you can significantly improve the performance of your game on older PCs and laptops, and ensure that more users can enjoy the game without experiencing lag or long loading times.

assistant: Based on the information provided, it seems that the performance issues are related to the game's loading times and possibly the graphics demands. To increase the number of people having fun in the game, you could consider the following:

1. Optimize graphics: One potential reason for the lagging and stuttering could be the graphics demands of the game. You could optimize the graphics by reducing the texture quality, polygon count, and other graphic settings. This could help improve the game's performance on older computers.

2. Improve loading times: Another issue seems to be the long loading times, especially when entering and exiting houses. You could optimize the loading times by preloading the assets and using asynchronous loading. This could help reduce the waiting times for players and make the game more enjoyable.

3. Streamline gameplay: If players are avoiding entering houses and shops to avoid loading times, it may be worth considering ways to streamline the gameplay. For example, you could reduce the number of loading zones, combine loading zones, or find ways to make the gameplay flow more smoothly without frequent loading screens.

4. Test on a wider range of devices: It's important to test the game on a wide range of devices to get a better sense of the performance issues. You could try testing the game on a variety of computers and laptops with different hardware configurations to identify specific performance issues and optimize the game accordingly.

By optimizing graphics, improving loading times, streamlining gameplay, and testing on a wider range of devices, you can help increase the number of people having fun with your game.

assistant: What you need is to a bit of game optimization. Here are a few suggestions which can help you fix your problems.

1. Make sure that you are culling your objects properly. It is possible that your game is rendering people who are not visible on screen, which means every time a new zone loads, the game has to re-render every single person, which may cause your game to load very slowly. Therefore, the trick is to not render things when they are not visible to the player, which will increase your game performance.
2. Make sure that you are not running expensive update functions at every frame. The more things the game has to keep track of, the more performance it will require from the player's computer. Instead of keeping track of every detail such as the exact position and action of each and every NPC, it is OK to abstract some of them to only update when the game loads into an area.
3. Make sure your assets are properly optimized for games. Many assets from the internet are designed for 3D rendering, and as such contains a much higher number of polygons than typical game assets and does not have the proper scaling level of detail (LoD) baked in. Many of the 3D assets, therefore, needs to have their polygon count reduced in order to not tank your performance for your entire scene.