Official DOTS Development Status And Next Milestones - December 2021

Yes! This is the type of news and announcements we were waiting for! Keeping us updated is the right approach, and you did it guys! Thank you. And I'm excited for what comes next!

 

Thank you very much for the communication and transparency! I look forward to 2022!

My only request is that this sort of communication be provided more frequently, and when unable to do so (depending on the reason) merely share something like "we can't share anything new right now, but we are still moving forward". I fully believe in DOTS as well as ECS as it has definitely improved my projects.

 

Thanks for the update!
So what can we expect from 0.5 compared to the current 0.17 release?
Some patch notes would be nice.

 

Oh great! Looking forward to it!

 

Sounds like we will get more of the ugly hybrid approach rather than the full DOTS solution.

 

Sounds like both to me. And I'd quite like my existing mono project to be accelerated by say, DOTS hybrid renderer v2, or subscenes.

That sounds like a good candidate to mix, if possible. I want speed. I don't want to fight or work harder. That's a good customer demand.

 

I don't know about others that much, but I like the current system.
I have no problem, if Unity decides to keep mono behaviors and entities separated.
Since its less work for those, who already learned the current way.

Sure it would be nice to have one perfect system that just works right now.
To me it feels like demanding trip to mars.
Right now I'm happy that its even possible to do some ideas that has been previously impossible.

So, I'm happy if they just keep improving the current systems. Especially the audio, netcode and physics tool sets.
Also things like upgrading the good example projects to latests ecs packages. Even that would be a lot to me

 

We also want the samples (fps, megacity etc) to be continuously updated to the latest DOTS packages. That would be so helpful to get better insights on the newer not-outdated API!

 

Yes even if its just for Unity to see how it is to keep a project alive between new versions of Unity.

 

@LaurentGibert thanks for the update.
Burst stability has been great for a while, and performance is still insane.

Are there any significant (coding) ease of use improvements in V50 or V1.0?
GameObjects still seem 10x easier to use, which was always a huge selling point for Unity
Entities/Jobs/ForEach/Burst/HPC# etc. are still a little hard to use.

 

Can you PLEASE and make sure at least one of those demo / example scenes fulfills both below requirements:

1. It is maintained for a reasonable amount of time and works with many future Unity versions. If it stops being maintained it's because another sample project that fulfills roughly the same purpose has replaced it. <- Up to now none of the Unity produced demo scenes have fulfilled this requirement, in fact Unity's demo scenes are notorious for being deprecated and incompatible with newer Unity versions the moment they are released.


2. It is made reasonably well, with things that can be considered "best practices", even for secondary things. <- I remember the angry bots demo being made reasonably well (or maybe I just didn't know better at the time?), but more recent demo scenes contain things that are flat out terrible. This shouldn't happen! Users use these as examples of how to do things. But if I open a recent Unity sample what do I learn?

In the FPS Sample I learn that to deal with lightprobes, I need to MURDER my scene with so many lightprobes it starts looking like scanned data point cloud:


In the even more recent HDRP Sample, I learn that I shouldn't care about lightmap UVs at all

There are many more. My examples don't have to do anything with DOTS, it's because I know a lot more about Unity's Lighting than DOTS, so I'm more comfortable calling out lighting related things, but I hope my general point still comes through.

People use these sample scenes as examples on how to do things and all the elements, that are not obviously placeholders, should be made with the highest quality and care, as they will be used as a reference point for Unity users and will find their way in many released games.

 

Well by reading the tea leaves and such (github PRs) we should be able to "pick" (click and select) entities in the editor which is something that should have been prioritized since day 1 imho (along with collider rendering... debugging invisible colliders is a royal pain in the arse)

 

I meant for coding in particular
They'll probably figure out the Editor integration, I am not worried about that tbh.

 

THANKS!!! DOTS RULES!!!

 

Some of them have not been made by core DOTS team.
FPS sample uses various hack solutions if I remember correctly.
It would need to be most likely redesigned ground up, by DOTS team, to be up to date.
Megacity demo used old long depreciated solutions. But if I am correct there is version made by community, which works with Unity 2020.

Transiting any project to keep up to date, requires significant effort. Specially if various packages are depending. Rendering pipeline changes will be first major obstacle, to bring things up to date. Hence probably very time consuming to do so.

If anything, the best and fresh thing is, to bring completely new demo, which uses latest packages.
Something which uses networking and DOTS, i.e. combining FPS sample and Austin demo.
I wouldnt be surprised, if Unity doesn't work on it already. Or some independent group. Which later is happy to share the source code.

 

@LaurentGibert This is great news
I am curious about the state of the rest of DOTS (aside from ECS) and what improvements we can expect. Blob Assets, Burst, Native Collections and Jobs are all great tools by themselves and I'm wondering what this announcement means for them specifically. Improvements to Burst's debuggability, more BlobAsset structures (a hash-map for instance), more allocators in the style of UnsafeScratchAllocator, etc... Any of these (and/or others in the same vein) would make this announcement even better

 

Couldn't have said it better myself! I agree with you. However, what I meant by "more frequently" is like once a year or so.

I guess that's even a better idea!

 

I wonder how many coders use entities like I do :

* No hybrid renderer, no ecs transform, no conversion, I dont use any of the built-in ecs components.
* my own carefully crafted custom ecs code, components, systems, foreach jobs.
* a pool of renderer gameObjects with a custom RenderLink IComponentData and a renderSystem that runs on mainThread.
* some monobehaviours to debug and bootstrap my systems.

 

This is basically how I handle things whenever I dev in Unity, largely because it keeps tracking data flow easier.

 

@Razmot I think you may be better to create seprete thread on that. Otherwise we may get into oftopic, as question is not directly related to OP discussion.

 

@Joachim_Ante this move would definatelly please many DOTS developers
Specially many of us did asked few times, about keeping these more up to date.
But I got it l, why it hasn't happen so far. 1.0 seems good standing point, to bring these things up to pair.

 

Not production ready? I dont care just cant live without air.

 

We're the same on the first and second. We use our own renderer. I hope there wouldn't be much API changes as our ECS code is already quite extensive.

 

Did you place those probes with a script, like "auto light-probes" or manually?

 

If I understood correctly, V50 will not be compatible with 2021 LTS, is that correct?

 

Not at the beginning of 2022 (when released), but will be later. It's a huge blocker for me to be honest. My GPU animation instancing needs features from 2021 and the current entities package works fine. I'm assuming hybrid renderer is the culprit.

 

Extending the above question, will 0.5 be compatible with 2022.1/2 ? Since those versions already have changes targeting dots 1.0.
Having to wait another year for support on latest unity version would be a heavy blow T_T, specially considering that 2020/2021 have serious performance regressions and some render pipeline bugs/missing features (maybe some were backported, I haven't checked).

 

The entitie 0.5 will contain enable/disable function？

 

Hi @LaurentGibert. I have a couple of questions want to ask.
1) I have the impression that DOTS is very focusing on desktop but not mobile platform i.e. Android and iOS. Currently I'm using dots netcode and it has a lot of performance and networking stability issue. Is that currently there's no dots mobile project at Unity production to battle test mobile platform? Any plan to improve it?
2) The current subscene conversion speed is insanely slow. Even I just change 1 simple field of data a lot of time I need to wait for ages and even sometime need to end task Unity to make it convert properly. It seems like Entities failed to incrementally scan and update the delta changes. Any plan to improve it?
3) DOTS mobile project takes insanely long time to build. It's seems like something wrong with the dots build pipeline. Any plan to improve it?
4) Can I expect a better Entities debug and visualization tool at version 0.5?

 

While I think that keeping a hybrid apporach has its advantages and can be interesting if the integration is done properly (looks very hacky today IMO), I'm concerned about other gamedev features that could make good use of DOTS such as AI and skinned meshes.

Can we expect easy to use and well integrated DOTS versions of these features in the future?

 

Will the demos be updated in time for the 0.5 or are they slated for being released for 1.0?

 

Sadly these are not news. We knew an update was coming by looking at Github commits. What we need is a clear roadmap and vision and that's none of it.

While DOTS solves real issues in Unity, its stable core is two years late, still experimental, and hasn't received any update in a year. None of it would matter if, on the other hand, Unity would have released new ways to author high quality, stutter-free streaming environments, or just announced anything in that regard. But Unity just stalled and I certainly am not the only one losing faith in the company and its software.

Unity users jumped on the Unity 5 PBR workflow during its beta because they trusted Unity. Unity users early adopted Mecanim, Enlighten, SpeedTree, Shader Graph, VFX Graph, SRP and so on again because they trusted Unity would deliver these things down the line. The same goes for DOTS, animation, physics and world building. People who trusted Unity has now nothing to build trust on:

• Should we really believe that DOTS 0.5 will arrive in Q1 2022?
• Should we really believe that DOTS 1.0 will arrive in the next two years and be well integrated?
• Should we really spend our companies money on that high risk gamble?
• What happened to the new world building systems? Will it be DOTS or Monobehaviour?
• Will we have a DOTS animation graph?
• Will we have usable audio system for DOTS?

In the last three years, Unity went public and acquired a bunch of companies that won't give anything to game developers for the next two years, while Epic made Fortnite tech stack available to all, acquired Psyonix, Quixel, Mediatonic, RealityCapture, and more, plus they have Unreal 5 production ready now, Meta Humans, Mega Grants and free Mega Scans.

I myself bought Unity stocks, provided a lot of feedback for DOTS and HDRP. But I really am disappointed by this (lack of) update. We're not enlighened by anything here. For anyone following DOTS closely, what we read here is: "We'll give more news in 2022", and nothing else.

1. Where and what is the next Unity for games?
2. How will Unity 2022 and 2023 compare to Unreal 5?
3. Will DOTS be part of that vision?
4. Is Unity really commited to shipping DOTS-compatible and production-ready physics, animation, ui, rendering, audio and other systems?

 

In that case would it be possible to mix high performance largely static world rendering with general gameobjects that are dynamic? So that Unity handles the hard task of streaming and rendering lots of things, while I code happily and simply in gameobjects for everything else?

Obviously I'd have to keep the colliders in gameobject land but the environment rendering - the slow part of gameobjects - could be DOTS.

I feel it would be a good problem-solve for many and a great gateway to DOTS at large.

 

Sort of agree, why cant we just get back to updates now? Quite honestly, I never really expected smooth sailing from being an early adopter, but I did expect the winds to be more plentiful and bountiful than what we've had lately.

 

I feel for the DOTS team, so much attack on what it should be.

It'll be exciting to see how the new frameworks can be used!!

Edit: my $0.02, Game Objects and DOTS shouldn't mix, it sounds like a mess. I would rather choose one framework or the other.
Some may argue that this is the same fork in the road that was brought about with HDRP vs URP though. Decisions are hard.

 

Will there be dots animation and dots audio in V0.5？

 

I'm not mixing in this case, the responsibility is clearly separated, as it often is with a job like large-scale static env rendering in other engines too.

It can be achieved today with existing hybrid renderer, but the path is not smooth so I'm enquiring if Unity will smooth it.

If it goes well, I can see myself doing more and more DOTS work here and there, eventually moving over when the rest of Unity's technology is fleshed out.

 

What about Project Tiny? Will it continue it's development separate? Will it merge with the "Big DOTS" development line?
Is there even a future for a pure DOTS environment?

 

Is determinism still a goal? Burst was supposed to have deterministic floats. Right now, my team is divided between those who want to use ECS and try to hack in software floats and those who just want to give up and switch to C++ or something else.

 

Awesome. Maybe I elaborate more about one of the long term dots issue at mobile platform for dots netcode that still haven fixed yet until now. Currently one issue I encounter is sometimes it will become super unstable and start spamming lots of error code -5. I believe there's something wrong with transport package that dots netcode using it. Currently I see the transport package version ady reached 1.0.0-pre.10 version but I'm not whether this issue has been addressed and fixed. Can you make sure this issue is fixed and available at dots 0.5 release for dots netcode? https://forum.unity.com/threads/mutiple-errorcode-5-related-warnings.1098229/

Currently hybrid component feature doesn't work really well. For my project, when I use it at game object based particle system there will be some effect will be missing after converted to entity. Any plan to improve it?
And also when game object based particle system has Skinned Mesh Renderer component it will not converted that component properly too. Long time ago Hybrid Renderer team tells me that they are not planning to support game object land Skinned Mesh Renderer conversion. Is that still the case for this new plan?


More questions.
1) What's ETA to ship pure dots UI package? Up until now I still can't get any info it will release anytime soon. Currently I'm using game object based UGUI which is one of the huge bottleneck of my mobile project as I need to use very slow class type system to update UI. With dots UI package I can migrate to burst system.
2) What's the ETA to ship pure dots AI package like dots behavior tree or dots utility AI or others?
3) Is there any plan and ETA to ship pure dots AI navigation package instead of current navigation that needs to access C++ land which is kind of slow and buggy?

 

Q / Will we be able to convert all gameobjects (including the camera itself) to entities? Will we be able to convert VFX Graph particle gameobject to entity to simulate particles from millions to billions?