DOTS roadmap questions (we are 6 months into production with DOTS)

We are 6 months into pre-production with DOTS in our indie game. I'm very happy with the results and given how fast the packages were moving and Entities and physics are almost stable, I was hoping that we get some good updates on the DOTS multiplayer open world shooter and as a result DOTS animation, HDRP hybrid renderer and ... but the GDC showcase talk did not contains those. Can I hope that we'll hear from you guys in less than 2 months/until the actual GDC at least to see how far into the future those will be ready enough that we can wrap it up and start looking for publishers or we need to simply change our plans?

I understand that this is preview tech and things can change dramatically and we use it with the risk accepted but just want a bit more transparency and I guess many of the comments here made it harder to be more transparent.

Thanks and I made a playable of the game ready without arts to show to unity people in the virtual booth but I don't know anyone related to DOTS is there or not?

 

Honestly, I feel uncomfortable that DOTS is not one of the "highlights" of Unity 2021. We're planning to go full DOTS for our next game.

 

@Ashkan_gc you are better safe to assume, specific requested features wont happen anytime soon, or ever.
Then you won't be badly surprised.
I suggest, either avoid taking specific design path, or design own utilities, to combat such requirements.

By what I gather, it looks like Unity and DOTS team works on more than just DOTS itself. But also on DOTS integration with Unity engine, its utilities and related packages. That by my understanding, brings ranges of challenges and extends dev time further into future.

 

Yeah, paraphrasing what was on the GDC keynote: they want to reimagine the workflows for ECS. So they basically didn't talk about it any further. It probably means there won't be any meaningful updates any time soon. Until then, Jobs and Burst are here to stay for the GameObject workflows as well, officially (I guess Jobs will leave preview).

 

@Lurking-Ninja Jobs are not in preview. I guess they are stable since 2018.x

Regarding the broader picture. It should be much better since the animation team announced in their forum that there will be no updates for a few months in February IIRC. and they said this is for making the package ready for the internal game project or something like that which should be the multiplayer open world shooter project.

@Antypodish I'm not looking for any specific feature requests just being able to play animation and a bug in renderer to be fixed which doesn't allow us to upgrade to latest atm.

@davenirline I'd say that things were very stable since summer and we felt it is a good time to start and @Joachim_Ante 's messaging conveyed that to me and I think things are moving forward ok and just unity is trying to fix its image and announce things later rather than sooner because of bad behavior from the community IMO but I'm just guessing and thinking. They had overhauls like using source generators but people like Lucas Meijer there at the helm makes me very very confident. So hopefully we'll hear back from Unity soon. I'll post a video of our progress on youtube and tweet it and put it here in a few days at worst or today at best. It is not fair that I just ask and talk

 

I think @Lurking-Ninja may have meant Entities, rather Jobs.

 

based on comments in the blog post from Martin , it seems to be like this

They will be quite for a few more months (similar to the DOTS animation related post) and then we can expect an update.

My hypothesis is they want to stabilize multiple things together and release with the new project like what they did with MegaCity. Maybe the project release gets pushed for later or something but at GDC time (actual GDC) they should show something

 

Which one?


Jobs is stable, but still in preview. My guess is this will be changed very-very soon.

Entities surely won't come out from preview any time soon IMHO.

 

The jobs package provides extensions to job system for entities so don't expect that package to be released until entities is released.

From the package manual

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.jobs@0.8/manual/index.html

The job system itself has been released with the editor for a while.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/JobSystem.html

 

to be clear @Lurking-Ninja Jobs is a part of unity core as @tertle said and this package is for extensions which systems need.

So using IJob, IJobFor and creating custom job types which don't rely on Entities is fully stable. Same is true about burst, each unity version has a verified package of burst.

You can use them and in fact many none-ECS/entities related packages both from unity and others use it. You can use it for computation heavy stuff as well. for example 2d IK, 2d animation and Kinematica are some unity packages which is them if burst is installed.

There are also methods which allow you to write jobs for things like raycast (for physics not DOTS physic), modify textures and meshes using jobs and native collections and ... and

 

Yes, you guys are right, somehow I missed that part.

 

I thought i posted here
So Martin from Unity commented in the blog that they'll be quite for a few more months.
They probably would release something and show the open world shooter demo in actual GDC (my guess)

 

Oh, if that uses NetCode, then it should probably implement something that makes so not every player sees every ghost, which as far as I know, is the only thing that bars MMO's from being done on the NetCode package (although maybe that was solved months ago and I just didn't knew, since It's been ages since I last checked it)

 

Added in the latest versions. Read the changes.

 

Yea the latest NetCode focused heavily on developers being able to specify what data is sent to what clients.

 

yes player culling and doing it in a way that is not CPU intensive is one of the big factors in scalability even for none-MMO games like fortnite/halo/... which have many interactive objects. Check unreal's network replication graphs for a potential solution for fortnite like session based, fast pace FPS games

MMOs have long used different ways based on grids of different sorts to limit AOI (area of interest) of players and they have less fast paced elements and projectiles and ... and in the older days limited players more and limited their game designs. DOTS can potentially revolutionize MMO servers or at least makes it much easier to build innovative solutions