Official Blog Post Series - Games Focus: Expanded Scale for Ambitious Games

I think most of us, who closely follow this forum, want a more technical blog post rather than this. There is nothing there we don't know about. It's disappointing that official talks and posts from Unite 2022 until now hardly contain any new information regarding DOTS. You said you cover "upcoming release plans" in the post, but I see no plan there.

 

Unite 2022 hosted on discord a day of Q&A session. It was a great opportunity, to ask anything, which may have been related to your project, or just to fill your curiosity.

Our team gained tons of invaluable details and information through chat with Unity DOTs team, which most likely wouldn't be covered otherwise in any individual blog posts, as most of our questions were quite specific.

Also an insight from games like VRising, are really appreciated technical info.

So if upcoming event will open to Q&A too, or share games technical challanges, then it allows to answer such questions, which DOTS devs maybe be looking for.

Just writing blogs alone, may be a bit shooting in the dark. Some will find them useful, some don't. But open discussions are good things.

 

Mark your calendar for December 8th :

Hammer them with question.
Just don't expect definitive and precise ETA.
But at least you can get info on where things are going, what is the short terms focus.
And provide feedback on your critical use case.

 

Well, joining a live Q&A session is not an option for me. I would like to have a bunch of documentation, blog posts, forum discussions to read instead.

 

Why is that?
It is not like you need sit 8 hrs staring at the discord.
You can write the question and come back at own peace, when someone's replies.

 

You can prepare you question post them all on opening and comme back later to look over the response and see others topic.

You can still check out the unite ask the expert discussion in discord
https://discord.com/channels/489222168727519232/1034475484492337292

 

I thought the blog post explained the general direction in which development is heading; but was short on technical details. I am glad to hear that determinism and animation is on the agenda. Both are areas that would benefit us greatly.

I am still not sure what cross-platform determinism means. I assume it is in the broader sense of applying to the x86-64 and ARM architectures. Rather than in the narrower sense of instruction set architecture. Or does it refer to microarchitecture Intel, AMD along with different generations of hardware from the same manufacture? Does platform correspond to the Unity Build settings? How does the Burst AOT settings where you can select target CPU architecture relate?

We would prefer to have a more performant compiler option only supporting x86-64 and limited to CPU microarchitecture’s that support AVX or AVX2. For all I know this is already supported by Burst.

If you support a high-performance determinism option, AVX is already a requirement in many games and AVX2 is not far behind. You may as well go with AVX2 because that will stand the test of time better. The Steam survey has AVX at 96.54% and AVX2 at 90.34%. Both are increasing at the rate of a few percentage points per year. AVX2 is probably around 3 years behind AVX and AVX was already a requirement for some games in 2019. It is a little early for AVX2 if you are launching tomorrow but in 18 months you will have company.

 

Will Unity release the 2022.2 Megacity demo (HDRP&URP) for us to experience & learn ECS?

It's an amazing demo with beautiful graphics (HDRP ver.) and I can even run it on mobiles. (LWRP ver.)

I know that there is a 2018 release but it's nearly unusable now. (ECS has changed a lot)

 

All this is cool and all but as a programmer I would really love some barebones multiplayer projects to start from. Garry's Mod has this with its "base" gamemode. A simple setup with team support out of the box.
These projects should contain no assets. Just capsules running around and fully set up with matchmaking and Rival.

I'm going to test out these mega-projects too, but I already understand most of the DOTS features so I would like to just go ahead and make things immediately from starter projects.

 

is there come with any animation solution ?

 

DOTS is fast, but i really feel that unity must start focusing on ease of use of these technologies! Unity must provide a DOTS VS with complete functionality of jobs system and burst integrated in it and more streamlined workflows for artists to use DOTS for creating open world's easily without much knowledge of the underlying framework of the technology! Unreal does this job much better and at the same time being insanely fast due to nanite and other in-built performance tools like HLOD, world partition and also is much more time efficient and simpler because of those tools!! There is literally no reason to use unity DOTS over unreal 5 if making 3d games for pc and consoles! For example, Unity subscene is fast but unreal's world partitioning system is much better, it provides out of the box distance parameters for unloading and partitions the world into the given grid size automatically, and not just that it also has tightly integrated HLOD system in it which helps in creating low quality chunks with smaller memory footprints, allowing things to be rendered at very far distances without performance impacts! With VS the artists in my team can directly and easily author basic logics like input systems and animation and thus saving time of programmers, who can now focus more on heavy tasks! The animation system in unreal is much more advanced and has tools like motion warping which makes the development of parkour systems in our game much more simple and faster! And that's not it, there are many other features and tools like megascans etc which is making our job much easier and magnitude times faster than unity!! I really hope unity takes this feedback seriously if they want to target AAA! We are definitely going to switch to unreal for our next project!