Official DOTS development status and next milestones – September 2022

I am expecting to implement of the ECS-based Animations and Blend Shapes.
It's most important feature.
I think, DOTS with Playables (or Animator) performance is too bad.
I can't wait for the day when we can make basic-character system using only DOTS!

 

I just want the baking system to work. 'Cause right now it's basically unusable. Requiring full editor restarts after every minor change.

 

Nice to see megacity getting revived. Could DOTS fps sample also get updated?

 

my assumption is fps sample cant really be released as an updated sample until animation is ready to be previewed again

 

This statement feels deliberately misleading. The changes to for each only simplifies if you only want to run on the main thread. The loss of Entities.ForEach that generates a job is a huge setback in terms of how much boilerplate code we have to write now to execute jobified logic.

 

I was thinking “you know, the only reason I don’t often use jobs is how awkwardly they integrate with OOP or CBP architecture”. When you’re writing components, you’re really focusing on “how should this thing work?” ECS has a baking step for that, where you can take your components and transform them into data altogether, and the best part is that you can write these bakers without ever touching the original script.

This might be the wrong forum for it, but I was thinking, why should this baking step be exclusive to ECS? Couldn’t native unity profit from it too? We could use it e.g. to convert our own components into jobified code that DOES still respect regular unity go-structure. ECS is great but I’ve always felt there’s no bridge between the one and the other, and it has always kept me from exploring this great performance from the job system and burst further because it doesn’t line up with standard CBP practices. The ECS baking step integrated in regular Unity seems like a perfect way to bridge that gap.

 

I agree that the scene conversion/baking technique is fundamentally very useful. Pre-ECS I started to use the

[PostProcessScene]

attribute which lets you implement similar nondestructive functional-style scene transformations that are executed during build (and right when the scene is loaded if the editor is in play mode). Stuff you can do:

• Modify, update, replace, combine components
• Optimize hierarchy, remove unused objects and components
  
• Validate the scene and warn if anything's broken
• Anything else you come up with, really - sky is the limit! (But don't go overboard with slow code, or your editor play mode load times will suffer. Your scenes are entirely pre-optimized at build time, though!)

I usually stick to simple functions that iterate over scene objects, but you could probably even write some sort of a pipeline similar to ECS baking.

What I like about it is how mercilessly reliable this attribute is - you can always safely assume that the code was executed exactly once sometime after the scene was last edited, and there's no manual steps for you to forget. Working like this for a while has convinced me that conversion/baking in ECS is a pretty good idea. I cannot imagine living without some sort of a scene baking pipeline, with or without ECS!

 

What about 2D package support? At least remove the compilation errors that occur when you add the ecs package to a 2d project template... Or specifically mention 2D is not supported,I spent 4 hours trying to make it work just because I assumed it was.

 

The only package not yet compatible with DOTS is the 2D package is animation. Remove that specific package and you're good to go.

Here's the entirety of my minimal package list required for Entities & Physics & Netcode + 2D Sprites & 2D Tilemap:

Code (CSharp):

1. {
2.   "dependencies": {
3.     "com.unity.2d.pixel-perfect": "5.0.3",
4.     "com.unity.2d.sprite": "1.0.0",
5.     "com.unity.2d.spriteshape": "9.0.1",
6.     "com.unity.2d.tilemap": "1.0.0",
7.     "com.unity.burst": "1.8.1",
8.     "com.unity.entities": "1.0.0-exp.12",
9.     "com.unity.ide.rider": "3.0.16",
10.     "com.unity.inputsystem": "1.4.4",
11.     "com.unity.netcode": "1.0.0-exp.13",
12.     "com.unity.physics": "1.0.0-exp.12",
13.     "com.unity.render-pipelines.universal": "14.0.3",
14.     "com.unity.test-framework": "1.1.33",
15.     "com.unity.modules.audio": "1.0.0",
16.     "com.unity.modules.imageconversion": "1.0.0",
17.     "com.unity.modules.particlesystem": "1.0.0",
18.     "com.unity.modules.physics": "1.0.0",
19.     "com.unity.modules.physics2d": "1.0.0",
20.     "com.unity.modules.tilemap": "1.0.0"
21.   }
22. }

That being said, 2D DOTS is not and will not be supported by Unity for the near future (think 2+ years). Last news coming out of Tiny is that the entire team was dissolved and scattered in the last reorganization. If you want to do anything fancy with 2D in a DOTS environment, you will need to code it yourself.