Learn how to reduce the power consumption of a non-game Unity application, for mobile.

Recently, we were asked to build some software using Unity. That is, we weren’t asked to build a game, but instead, the client wanted an app.

There are a few reasons why you’d want to use Unity to build non-game software.

1. Cross-platform support. One of Unity’s biggest selling points is the fact that you can write your code once, and Unity makes it easier to bring that code over to multiple platforms, like iOS and Android, as well as desktop platforms.
2. Graphics support. Being a game engine, Unity is very good at tasks that involve processing either 2D or 3D graphics. In our case, we were asked to build an app for building comic book pages, and that means working with lots of sprites.
3. C# coding environment. It’s almost always better to write your code in the native language for your chosen platform, but in cases where that’s not feasible, C# is quite good for most platforms. Unity provides a good, performant, and featureful implementation of the language, as well as the .NET runtime.

However, there are a few things that keep Unity from being a great tool for making non-game apps. In this post, we’ll look at one of them, and how to reduce its impact: power consumption in Unity-based apps

This post is largely written with mobile in mind, and with a particular focus on iOS. However, the technique is pretty broadly applicable.

Reducing Power Consumption

The most pressing issue is that Unity, like all game engines, re-draws its content every frame. That’s not something that you need to do in an app, where most of the frames are going to be identical to the previous one. Most of that work is going to waste, and that means wasted power. Wasted power is particularly bad on mobile devices, since it means a needless drain on the device’s battery.

This is particularly striking when you see that an empty scene – one with nothing more than a camera, rendering the skybox – consumes significant amounts of CPU resources. On my iPhone X, for example, rendering the empty scene at 30 frames per second consumes about 20% of the CPU.

To reduce this issue, you can reduce the rate at which Unity updates, by reducing the target framerate. This can be done in a single line of code:

// Request that Unity only update every 1/10th of a second
Application.targetFrameRate = 10; 

This will reduce the amount of work that Unity does, but it has a downside: Unity will only run the Update method on your scripts once per frame, which means it will take up to 100 milliseconds for your code to notice that the user pressed a button. Additionally, setting the framerate to a fixed rate like this means that any moving content on your screen will always visibly lag. On top of this, we still haven’t really solved the original problem: the screen is still updating, many times a second, and each time it does, there’s only a small chance that anything that the user sees will have changed.

The solution, then, is to find a way to make Unity never re-draw the screen unless something happens. What that “something” is depends upon the details of your app, but generally always includes things like user input: you want to re-draw the screen when the user taps the screen, or drags their finger over it, because that’s highly likely to mean they want to press a button or drag an object around.

Hacking the Render Loop

Unity provides a way to control the player loop – the set of things that Unity does every frame. This includes re-rendering the scene, but also covers tasks like clearing the render buffers, collecting input, and – most importantly – running the Update methods on scripts. Using the PlayerLoop class, you can inspect the contents of the player loop, remove certain subsystems, and add some of your own as well.

Or, you could blow the whole thing away.

using UnityEngine.Experimental.LowLevel;
// Get the default loop
var playerLoop = PlayerLoop.GetDefaultPlayerLoop();
            
// Remove _everything_ from it!! There are no rules! Unlimited power!!
playerLoop.subSystemList = null;
// Apply this new "player loop" - the game will immediately stop
PlayerLoop.SetPlayerLoop(playerLoop);

If you remove all subsystems from the player loop, you effectively remove almost all of the work that Unity does each frame. There’s still some overhead that can’t be disabled, like the code that actually invokes the player loop, but by doing this, we’re getting rid of almost all of Unity’s work.

Disabling the Renderer

One of the things that emptying the player loop doesn’t directly control is the fact that Unity will attempt to run parts of the render loop as long as a camera is active in the scene.

To work around this, we can just disable the camera. However, if you do this in an Update function, the screen’s display will have already been cleared at the start of the frame. As a workaround to this, we can disable the camera, and then immediately tell the camera to render the frame. Because we won’t be clearing the display at the start of the next frame (there won’t even be a next frame), the frame will remain on screen.

As a result, the amount of CPU usage is dropped significantly. In the following image, I’ve dropped the CPU down to 3%. It’s not zero, but it’s very close; in fact, at this level of usage, the biggest power drain on the device is the screen.

Putting it All Back

So, we’ve now managed to completely stop the player loop, at a tremendous energy saving. But now we have another problem: how do we wake the app back up again when the user interacts with the screen, if all of the code that checks for input is no longer being run?

The solution is to look for input events that come from the system, and use that to wake up the application. To do this, we’ll need the following things:

1. A way to run native code when touch events occur
2. A way to run C# code from that native code, which restores the player loop

Everything up until this point has been entirely cross-platform, and should work on all platforms. However, because we’re now looking at native code, we need to focus on the native code implementation details for a single one. In this post, we’ll look at iOS. If you’re an Android developer and want to contribute how you’d do this in Android, let us know!

To detect any touches, there are two places we could put our code: we could override the view controller that Unity places its view in, or we could go one level lower and detect all touches that the app receives. It’s actually simpler to do that, so let’s get started.

First, we’ll need to create a new subclass of UIApplication. This is different to the similarly-named UIApplicationDelegate; the UIApplicationclass is an object that represents the entire application, while the delegate is simply an object that responds to events that happen to the application.

You typically never need to create your own subclass of UIApplication, and Apple doesn’t recommend that you do it, unless it’s for the single specific purpose that we’re about to do here: intercept and process UI events, before forwarding them to the rest of the application.

So, let’s get started. First, we’ll create a new file in our Unity project, called TouchHandler.mm, and add the following code to it:

@interface TouchDetectingApplication : UIApplication
- (void)sendEvent:(UIEvent *)event;
@end
@implementation TouchDetectingApplication
- (void)sendEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
    
    // Handle touch event here!
    
    [super sendEvent:event];
}
@end

The sendEvent method will be run on every input event. It’s very important that we call the super implementation, since without doing that, no input will ever be delivered to the app. We’ll come back to this method in a bit.

Next, we need a way to notify our C# code that a touch has occurred. To do this, we’ll send a pointer to a C# method into the native code at game start; this method will restore the game loop, and resume rendering.

We’ll do all of this in a MonoBehaviour, which you can attach to an object in the scene. The following code also contains an example of how to stop and resume the camera, too.

public class FramerateManager : MonoBehaviour
{
    
    // A singleton instance of this class. Necessary, because the 
    // callback must itself be static; there are other ways to do 
    // this, but this serves fine for this example.
    private static FramerateManager instance;
    // The type of the C# callback method that the native code will 
    // call.
    public delegate void EventDelegate();
    // This method will be called from native code when a touch 
    // input arrives. This method must be static.
    [AOT.MonoPInvokeCallback(typeof(EventDelegate))]
    public static void TouchEventReceivedFromNativeCode()
    {
        // Restore the original player loop.
        instance.LeaveLowPowerMode();
    }
  #if UNITY_IOS && !UNITY_EDITOR
    // This is a native function that we'll call, and pass the 
    // TouchEventReceivedFromNativeCode method to as a parameter.
    [DllImport("__Internal")]
    private static extern void _AttachEventHook(EventDelegate actionDelegate);
  #endif
    // The number of frames remaining before we stop the loop. We 
    // leave a little buffer time after the last touch.
    private const int framesBeforeStopping = 5;
    private int framesRemaining;
    // A cached reference to the main camera. Necessary, because 
    // Camera.main only returns a valid value when there's an 
    // enabled camera in the scene.
    private Camera mainCamera;    
    void Awake()
    {
        // On game start, call the native method, and pass it the 
        // method we want it to call when touches occur. The native
        // code will keep a reference to this method as a function
        // pointer, and call it when it needs to.
#if UNITY_IOS && !UNITY_EDITOR
        _AttachEventHook(TouchEventReceivedFromNativeCode);
#endif
        // Set up our instance method.
        instance = this;
        framesRemaining = framesBeforeStopping;
    }
    private void Update()
    {
        // Count down until we're out of time.
        framesRemaining -= 1;
        // Time to stop.
        if (framesRemaining == 0)
        {
            EnterLowPowerMode();
        }
    }
    private void EnterLowPowerMode()
    {
        // Remove everything from the player loop
        var playerLoop = PlayerLoop.GetDefaultPlayerLoop();
            
        playerLoop.subSystemList = null;
        PlayerLoop.SetPlayerLoop(playerLoop);
    
        // Cache a reference to the camera
        mainCamera = Camera.main;
        if (mainCamera != null)
        {
            // Disable it!
            mainCamera.enabled = false;
            // We just disabled the camera, but if we called this 
            // in an Update function, it cleared the frame buffer 
            // before this frame started. To prevent being left 
            // with a blank screen, we manually re-render the 
            // camera right now; this image will remain on screen 
            // until normal rendering resumes.
            mainCamera.Render();
        }
      // We're done! The game will stop after this frame, and will 
      // wake back up when TouchEventReceivedFromNativeCode is 
      // called.
    }
    private void LeaveLowPowerMode()
    {
        // Restore the number of remaining frames before we stop 
        // again
        framesRemaining = instance.framesBeforeStopping;
        
        // Re-enable the camera so we resume interactive framerates
        if (mainCamera != null)
        {
            mainCamera.enabled = true;
        }
        
        // Restore the default player loop; the game will resume.
        PlayerLoop.SetPlayerLoop(PlayerLoop.GetDefaultPlayerLoop());
    }
}

We now need a way to receive a pointer to the C# method TouchEventReceivedFromNativeCode. This is done in the _AttachEventHook function, which is defined in native code and called from C#.

Add this to your .mm file:

// Declare the C++ type of the function pointer we'll receive from 
// C#.
typedef void (*EventDelegate)();
// Create a variable to store that function pointer.
static EventDelegate _eventDelegate = NULL;
// Declare that this function is a C function, and its name should not be mangled by the C++ compiler.
extern "C" {
  void _AttachEventHook(EventDelegate actionDelegate);    
}
// Finally, write the method that receives and stores the event 
// handling function pointer.
void _AttachEventHook(EventDelegate actionDelegate) {
    // Just keep it around.
    _eventDelegate = actionDelegate;
    
    // Log that it happened, too.
    NSLog(@"Event logging hook attached.");
}

We’re almost done. We now need to call the _eventDelegate function whenever a touch event lands.

Replace the sendEvent method in the TouchDetectingApplication class with this:

- (void)sendEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
    
    // Handle touch event here!
    _eventDelegate();
    
    [super sendEvent:event];
}

Finally, we need to tell the sytem to use the TouchDetectingApplication class, instead of the default UIApplication class.

Important note: While Unity will automatically copy any .mm and .h files into your project when you build the player, it will not do this step for you. Additionally, when you choose to do a build that Replaces the player (as opposed to Appending it), it will blow this change away! Fortunately, it’s a single code change, but you do need to remember to do it.

Open the main.mm file, and find the following line of code:

UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, [NSString stringWithUTF8String: AppControllerClassName]);

Replace it with this:

UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, @"TouchDetectingApplication", [NSString stringWithUTF8String: AppControllerClassName]);

The application will now use that class for its UIApplication, and it will send wake-up prompts when touch events occur!

Wrapping up

This technique is extremely useful for building apps that don’t need to re-draw the screen all the time. If you use it, let us know!