Official DOTS Editor 0.12.0-preview Release: The new way to inspect Entities

Does this special ECS Systems Profiler Module will slow down the game when profiling at real phone? The current Profiler inside the editor will slow down the game quite a lot. Maybe Profiler profile too many things at once make it so slow I dunno.

I also have a feature request for Entities window. Can u add highlight color like red color to the Entity that has Component with Entity reference when losing Entity reference? The Component also highlight the color too. I always have hard time to debug this.

 

I understand if it doesnt pan out. Blob assets are typically extremely large (I use them for pathfinding data 10,000+ nodes) and trying to fit that into the instructor would be a challenge.

If you can somehow expose that data for custom inspector elements, that would be great.

 

Most of my time with this tool is spent actually looking for the entity I'd like to inspect.

I feel like a broken record as this has been said for at least the last two years now but do you have plans to add a click on render bounds to display entity data feature at some point? Am I missing something, it seems like this is by far the quickest way to get to entity data for the general case?

Just like you would in normal Unity Monobehaviour.

 

Additionally please make additional mode or way to write our own or by default show all data in components not only part of it. Option to make ui writable will be very appreciated

And will be good to sort all single value components on top like you already sort tag components so order will be:
- one UI for all tag components
- single line ui for each single value component
- all other components

For Component inspectors please expose at least very very experimental API even if it will be 100% changed, but we can override inspector for IComponentData that will change default editor for all components and thus can make inspector do all things we need for now

 

Any plans to make the inspector work with manually updated worlds which are not part of the default PlayerLoop?

Worlds that are manually updated with World.Update() don't show up correctly. They show up as having no systems and only one entity WorldTime.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-to-create-custom-world.1094842/#post-7057126

 

Hi @uDamian I have one more feature request for Entities Window when there is DOTS Netcode package added. For the component that marked with GhostField attribute, there is also will have some identifier or highlight color to tell you it's GhostField component. And since GhostField attribute is marked per variable of component, the variable marked with GhostField attribute will also have some identifier or highlight color.

 

Is this still working? I just tried to add it to a 2021.1 project using "com.unity.dots.editor":"0.12.0-preview", and it said it was not available. Also, can we think about upping the usefulness and configurability of the manifest? At a minimum support json5/c so we can comment out packages without having to remove them and save them to another file and whatnot.

 

Entities is not supported on 2021 and won't be till end of year / early next year.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/notice-on-dots-compatibility-with-unity-2021-1.1091800/

 

Ah, well, that would do it. I suppose that would also explain why the standard entity debugger has not been working for me either, lol.

 

Hi @raymondyunity Can u send me unofficial fix for this based on DOTS Editor 0.12.0-preview.6? Currently it's totally unusable that u type c:ComponentYouWant gives u lots of unrelated results. Btw is that possible to type multiple components to further filter the results?

 

We've made some project-specific changes to the old inspector, extending it with things like buttons to switch between client and server entities (if a networked entity is selected) and also a bunch of other buttons/features to analyze the selected entity. We found it to be more complex to port these to the new inspector, so we thought that we would wait until the support for custom inspectors would come.

Seeing as the new entity inspector is now planned to soon fully replace the old one, we will probably try to look for a solution. But if the custom inspector support is likely to land relatively soon, we might want to wait. I totally understand if you don't want to leave expectations if there's any uncertainty related to release schedules, but do you think that the custom inspector support will be coming with that upcoming package update?

 

@uDamian Want to ask can I finally able to change the component data value of entity at inspector tab for debugging purpose in the next version of the com.unity.entities package?

 

An important limitation currently is when you need to edit data on some prefab that gets instantiated during play. The spawned entities will not have any sort of editable GameObject version of it in the Subscene, and so there's nothing you can do to edit that.

I think right now it allows you to tweak values on the prefab itself during play, but not only does that affect all instances of that prefab, but it also seems to reset the whole scene at every modification

 

I'm a bit confused why these isn't really considered a core feature, being able to edit numbers to balance/tune gameplay while in playmode is practically one of unity's strongest features. I cant really imagine a modern game engine not featuring something along these lines.

 

@uDamian I just want to get back something just like classic monobehavior that able to change value directly at play mode to test something. And also currently because of that limitatation dots physics needs to do convert and inject game object hack to deliver debug tool to toggle on/off as classic game object. If you change this limitation, I think dots physics longer needs to do this hack anymore.


Edit: For your crash/explode the Editor concern I guess u can leave it just like the way it's and inform the developer during new entities package release and continue to work on make it won't crash. Just wonder why it will like that since there's safety system for dots should make it not easy to crash?

Edit 2: Can you elaborate more about "where you want to fight against conversion and other systems"? I just want to use for debugging purpose and all the changes will be lost after exit play mode. I can't think of any possible way to get this issue.

 

I can't even imagine how are we supposed to make our games wihout ability to fiddle with various values in playmode. Exiting from playmode every time i want to tune something sounds terrible for me. This is one of the main features i'm waiting from DOTS 1.0 - full editor workflows support

 

By "the old inspector" that we've expanded I mean the IMGUI inspector currently bundled with the entities package, and not the UIElements inspector bundled in the DOTS Editor inspector package.

What we've had issues with is that we simply haven't really found a good place or how to hook in our custom inspector UI in the new entity inspector. I'm simply not sure where we would make custom component inspectors or adapt the base entity inspector, based on what's selected. I guess we maybe just haven't dug far enough in your source code, perhaps we'd need to make some alterations.

I'm not sure if it's possible, but it would be really helpful to be able to inject UI elements into the "header" of the inspector, above all the components. A simple event hookup for when the inspector UI is created would probably be enough. As an example; in the ordinary GameObject inspector we've added our own custom filtering options and some certain tool buttons that are context-based on the complete GameObject that you're inspecting.

As both GameObject and ECS component inspectors are often overflowing with components, having to scroll and search to find a specific component with a custom inspector button that you're looking for can be a waste of time. That is particularly true if the button you're looking for is something your project is almost always using for a certain type of GameObject/Entity. In that case, attaching it to the header of the inspector makes the user experience far easier and saves precious developer time.

 

Doesn't live link covers that requirements ?

 

For fine-tuning prepared values - yes, auto-conversion works great.
For debugging / experimentation / breaking things on purpose - no.

 

When searching for a component in the Entities window it often returns entities that don't have the component. PhilSA reported this bug a few months ago and it'll probably be fixed in the next release, but I'd like to re-report it just in case since I use the search-by-component feature dozens of times per day. Bug aside, thanks for all your work, Unity DOTS team!

 

Sorry to go a little offtopic but do anyone know if the limit on named entities will be increased? Printing info in a name is one of the most horrible yet useful ways to debug.

In case someone doesn't know what I'm talking about, u can give entities a custom name with EntityManager.SetName(entity, "name") but only for a fixed number of entities, if you go over it u get exceptions.

 

Another feature request if it hasnt already been added/thought of: A button or toggle or separate divider for all singleton entities that aren't prefabs. I like to keep a few of them around for storing config stuff and having to hunt them down from a long list is kind of annoying.

 

There are 2 bugs in DOTS editor "Entities window" with Unity 2021.2.0b16:
- When hovering entities in the window the highlight effect is gone. The icon on the right still works
- When inspecting an entity you can open up buffers but the element itself can't be opened up. Clicking on "element 0", "element 1", etc... does nothing.

Please fix this! Must be something minor. I guess it's UIToolkit related, if any member here knows how to fix this please post it.

 

Read up a few posts.

Example:

Unless something has changed, I don't think there will be much luck getting things fixed in 2021.x.

 

Note theres an annoying bug where a number of types such as RotationEuler combinations, Rotation Pivots and NonUniformScale use the float4x4 inspector and dont correctly show values. Replacing them all with the Float3ValueInspector fixes it.