2D concepts in Unity

So me and my team are developing a 2D game, and there are a number of issues we’re encountering and can’t really get our heads around.

What does texture atlasing actually achieve? Unity states you can take two planes that would use the same material but have different textures, you can combine the textures into a texture atlas and batch them. However if they use a shared material, then both objects will instead show both textures, unless you use offest and scale, but that affects all examples of the material. So you need to make an instance of the material to make different objects using the same material have different scales and offsets, but that breaks batching, so what is the point?

Also how are you meant to work around the fact that objects only batch when they have the same uniform scale? There is no way you can simply have every object in the game be exactly the same size, so again what are you meant to do?

Save yourself a lot of trouble and countless head spins - use one of the 2D plugins for Unity, it will take care of everything for you and will make Unity much more 2D oriented.

I can totally vouch for 2D Toolkit - the tool is extensive and the guy developing it provides support like you are his only customer.

Yes, making a simple 2D game in Unity is not that hard. You will know if it’s better to buy a plugin or do it yourself.

What does texture atlasing actually achieve?

The point is - as you already mentioned - that only objects with a uniform scale and the same material can be batched. So if you have e.g. multiple objects with one texture atlas, the uv-coordinates of the object will define which part of the texture will be assigned.

Also how are you meant to work around the fact that objects only batch when they have the same uniform scale?

As far as I know you should build your 3D-Models with the desired size and relation. Then you don’t have to scale them differently later in the Unity Editor. Or you could use the import scale feature for the imported mesh.

I really like the infromation on this blog: flyclops.com