Official DOTS Sample

Interesting, I don't recall seeing this issue, but also just try regenerating all the ghosts

 

Will there be any additions to the sample? After looking through I can see the beginnings of a 1st person implementation. Would like to see that up an running in the sample or if anyone has any ideas on doing it.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/202...gine-creator-tools.852253/page-5#post-5661214

@MartinGram but it sill uses very old dots packages:

Code (CSharp):

1. "com.unity.entities": "0.4.0-preview.10",
2. "com.unity.collections": "0.4.0-preview.6",
3. "com.unity.jobs": "0.2.2-preview.6",
4. "com.unity.netcode": "0.0.2-preview.1",

 

Hello again @Kamyker,

The cadence of updating DOTS sample packages is tied to where we are currently focusing our development efforts. So very often packages are in a state where we internally have packages available that can't be made public yet. There are even cases where we rely on versions of Unity that are further ahead than the publicly available releases.

This means that we have to be very conservative when making a new release of the DOTS Sample, and we make sure that we only rely on packages that are suitable for release and use unmodified versions of Unity.

Martin

 

It seems there may be a bug causing newly created objects to render at world origin. I've opened fresh projects in 2019.3.3f1 and 2019.3.6f1 and am using the provided custom shader graphs. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

 

Hello @MartinGram,
Thanks for clearing it up. I guess we are all wrong of what DOTS sample really is. Let me show you point-of-view of someone interested in making multiplayer in Unity. If you simply google "unity networking" you'll get some information:

First link: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UNet.html

Next one: https://unity.com/dots/packages#networking

Other one: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/06/13/navigating-unitys-multiplayer-netcode-transition/

Average user reading this may think: "Dots sample is not that far from production-quality sample. Let's download and make a game on top of it."

Well he could try but in reality Dots sample is just a snapshot of internal test project made before Sep 23, 2019 (presentation date) and released a bit later when used Unity version finally went public.

I hope to see production-quality netcode sample but my guess is 2022.

 

Hello Everybody, I am gratefull for this Package, I've been studying it for some, it is so Beautifuly done.
I am trying to implement the AbilitySelectSlot in the game in order to be able to swap weapons.
I got to a point at wich I am stuck...

The good is:
I have a GameDebug wich is showing me that the JobSystem for requesting ActiveState is running well

Code (CSharp):

1.     [UpdateInGroup (typeof (BehaviourRequestPhase))] //<------ WORKING
2.     [DisableAutoCreation]
3.     [AlwaysSynchronizeSystem]
4.     public class RequestActive:JobComponentSystem {
5.          protected override JobHandle OnUpdate (JobHandle inputDeps) {
6.             inputDeps.Complete ();
7.             GameDebug.Log ("SelectSlot Active Request Loop Working");
8.  
9.  

Then inside the logic of the Entities .ForEach() lamda expression
I am setting

stateIdle.requestActive = enabledAbility.activeButtonIndex != -1;

Wich is showing (True) when I press the KEY "1" that I reggistered for the Buttons, also working with the KEY "2"

So far it is going great! YAY

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The UNDESIRED on my case is that the other JobComponentSystem on the same ability is never being Updated as the Debugs I have are not showing up

Code (CSharp):

1. [UpdateInGroup (typeof (AbilityUpdatePhase))] //<--------- NOT WORKING
2.     [DisableAutoCreation]
3.     [AlwaysSynchronizeSystem]
4.     public class ActiveStateUpdate : JobComponentSystem {
5.         protected override JobHandle OnUpdate (JobHandle inputDeps) {
6.             inputDeps.Complete ();
7.             GameDebug.Log ("SelectSlot ActiveUpdate Loop THIS SHOULD BE SHOWING");
8.  

This structure is alike to all the other Abilities, I find it more similar to the AbilityDead as it has no Prediction or interpolation on it, the other Abilities enter to the loops and show Debugs but this one is not entering to the AbilityUpdatePhase

After I press the KEY 1 or 2, it stops shooting wich in some sense is desired, but the problem is this Key press only works once, if I press again any of the KEYS nothing happens, I suppose this is because the ability is not returning to Idle state so BehaviourRequestPhase JobSystem is not triggering again Anymore.

So the questions are:
1. Why ActiveStateUpdate system is not running even is I set stateIdle.requestActive? What could be preventing this?
2. How do I set the Ability, to be used again, after I already used it once?


I have some feeling this may be something related to the script AbilityOwner on wich

if (abilityStateIdleFromEntity[ability].requestActive) is not entering

         

Thanks for the time

 

I sometimes have this Log at the PrefabAssetRegistry SubScene, I am not shure what is generating it.
It is happening mostly when I erase the Networking/Generated files and then generate them again. Eventually the Log is gone.
I have tried to test this:
When the game is working good and I dont have any Log on the PrefabAssetRegistry I erase this files on propouse and the Log comes back, I am not sure what makes it dissapear. Is this a Bug?

InvalidOperationException: Could not find EnableDotsSampleGhostReceiveSystemComponent, make sure the ghost collection is generated from GhostCollection

I am also havving sometimes an error wick says Component BoneIndexOffset could not be added to the entity
And it is showing to be related to this Entities

Geom_Body_LOD1
Geom_Backpack_LOD3
Geom_Helmet_Glass_LOD2
Geom_Backpack_LOD0

I am looking forward to them and they have its SkinnedMesh in place and everything looks normal.

Sometimes when the EnableDotsSampleGhostReceiveSystemComponent is gone, the BoneIndexOffset appears

But when the EnableDotsSampleGhostReceiveSystemComponent is present, I have this error rather

InvalidOperationException: Structural changes are not allowed during Entities.ForEach. Please use EntityCommandBuffer instead.
Unity.Entities.EntityManager.BeforeStructuralChange () (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.entities@0.4.0-preview.10/Unity.Entities/EntityManagerSync.cs:48)

 

I no longer have this problem, I am unsure of what made it function, as i made many changes at same time. I have the feeling that I was misconfiguring the Flags of the Ability in the CharacterAuthoring Inspector.
Now I am able to swich weapons, having the unused one on the back and the other (actual slot) used on the hand, also showing the slot in a HUD. The 2 different models for the weapons are being shown correctly and being swapped from hand to the sides of the back each one independently. For this I differentiated the weapons in the Authoring by making a struct with the types of weapons, defining a identification empty component for each typo of weapon and assigning it to the entity using a swich statement depending on value of the Enumeration.
The problem I am facing now is this:
One of the weapons has a faster shooting rate than the other one. When I switch the slot you can see that fire rate changes as animation of the character becomes faster and the fire Debug also shows faster. But only wone weapon is showing the blue bullets and emmiting sound, the other shoots silently and blindly.

 

Is there a way to inspect the animation state of the local player character in the editor GUI during play mode?

I found the Entity Debugger window, and I can inspect component data of individual entities, but without a descriptive debug name associated with an entity, it is all pretty bewildering from a debugging context ("Entity 1923", "Entity 1996", etc.).

I understand the concept of needing to convert to DOTS representations, but at the same time, we need some editor representations so we can debug things quickly, by having some visual context for how the state is evolving. Maybe instead of discarding the human oriented authoring objects at runtime (prefabs, hierarchies) they can remain in place to a further extent in the editor during play mode than what I am seeing with this DOTS sample. Or simply have the scene window snap to the world position of an entity when it is selected, if it has a world position, and allow picking of DOTS collision in the scene window -> entity inspection.

I also selected Edit on the various subscenes after pressing play, but have not found anything I can select in the Hierarchy that would give insight into animation state, and I can't pick the character model in the scene window. Perhaps the problem is that when I select edit on the PrefabAssetRegistry subscene, there is an exception:

ArgumentException: A component with type:UserCommand has not been added to the entity.
Unity.Entities.EntityComponentStore.AssertEntityHasComponent (Unity.Entities.Entity entity, Unity.Entities.ComponentType componentType) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.entities@0.4.0-preview.10/Unity.Entities/EntityComponentStoreDebug.cs:233)​

 

is it possible to get a documentation for the DOTS sample?
I don't understand why Unity has made all this effort to create an amazing project like this but has made no effort for documentation.
I've been using ECS for more than 10 months now and I think that ECS is the future, but I have no experience developing games with it, so I see this project as a great learning opportunity, but it's really difficult to know where I should start.

 

No point making documentation for something that may change massively in the future.

 

Hello, I found this scripts in a Forum thread

https://forum.unity.com/threads/howto-ecs-entity-names-from-gameobjects.797739/

Basically this scripts write in the EntityDebuger window the names of the objects.
When I have some trouble with an Entity and it gives me an exception, I modify the Debug wich is causing the exception and print the Entity so I get the index, then I search it in the EntityDebuger and find the name of the related object.
To use this scripts just copy each of them in a script, and its ready to go.

 

Great, you already started here, we are in the same path.
This is a Preview package and it is released in order for us to study or explore it meanwhile it is fully released. I recommend to you to start analizing the Ability script, comment each thing you understand, and dont get frustrated. Make a copy of the proyect as it is very probable you are going to screw it up, a backup will be very handy. Then study the AutoRifle Ability script and understand the mechanics for the weapon to shoot.
And keep going like this, you will find how everything is going to be connecting. First time you open the project it is kind of shocking, latter on it starts to get sense, when you start to understand how things work.

 

You see, about year ago or so, injection was depreciated. And other few critical things as well.
Then new jobs arrived, including series of IJobForech.
Now we have recommended lambda approach, trying to depreciate that IJobForeach.
And I am not even confident, lambda is here to stay.

So every halve year or so, to keep up with latest, DOTS you may need do significant changes.

And all that besides, number new feather popping.

Team kept samples on git upto date, so that is massive +. Is best way to learn, followed by forum and of course, source code.

Edit:
That is why keeping up to date bunch of samples doc, us massive hurdle t Unity team.

I suppose, in light of current economics and lock downs, some may have more time now, to look into these docs, while working from home. But that is my pure assumption.

 

As people working on this are mostly developers doing prototyping to test advanced features I suggest Unity should align this sample to the betas and recent previews, maybe on a dedicated Github branch.
For instance, think about the recent SystemBase and its role on all this.
This sample and Unity.Animation.Samples should adopt it, and use 2020 Beta someday...
I guess this is what we all are doing these days. With a lot of fatigue and patience ...

 

Thank you!
For me it's a clear answer.

 

Hello, I am not sure how should I take in account the changes that are being made, maybe I am missing the way of ussing GitHub, because I have never worked by forking a repository.
I would like to know what should be my workflow for assuming the updates.
Should I download the new version and then start moving the changes I have already done?
Or maybe I should rather go the other way and instead, adding the updates to my already ongoing project?
Should I intead use some GitHub workflow for merging up my updates with your updates?
Thanks, I know this question may be due to my missunderstanding of the collaborative workflow on GitHub, but I would like to know some recommendations about my way to go.

 

From git bash or something:

Code (CSharp):

1. git add Assets
2. git commit -am "Custom changes as of x/xx/xx"
3. git checkout -b backup_x_xx_xx
4. git checkout master
5. git pull --rebase

 

Hi, that's good to know. I'm looking for multiplayer solution for my currently singleplayer shooter game. There are 3 choices: mirror, spatialos, dots.

- mirror - probably most stable solution as they have already 3500 commits - biggest disadvantage is mmo focus (with tcp/reliable udp) that may not be the best in my case
- spatialos - I'm not sure, looks fun but pricey and there's conflict of interest as it's impossible to host spatialos servers on Unity's Multiplay, also not that great latency for competitive shooter
- dots - probably the worst option at the moment as it's early preview

 

I think I have done a bad practice when dealing with the DOTS Sample:

When I added a second weapon I decided also to add 2 extra bones to all the Rigs, I did this adding 2 game objects to the Backpack Bone and setting a offset in the Transform.
As I modified the Array on wich the Bones are registered, all the indexes after the backpack were offset by 2, so I had to reasign all the indexes on all the scripts, in order for the animations an the IK to work wich is not so fun, as I still have left 2 errors I am not able to find.
So, evidently this is not the best aproach, because I assume I will have this problem for all the new updates you are going to throw on wich the Bone structure is referenced.

I think I should have instead attached the weapons to the Backpack and setting an offset and transformations from it, this way I would avoid all the struggle.
So my recomendation is to not modify the Bone array of none of the rigs!

A better way to go is somehow making it additive, create own scripts wich handle the new additions and plug them to the logic, but do not touch the Rig directly.

If possible I ask to the developers to modify the Error Log wich says "A component
with type ... could not be added to the Entity" and add some extra information about the entity in the Log, at least the Index and the name of the Entity because otherwise it becomes difficult the Debugging process. What I've been doing so far is to modify the Log myself but I dont like this, as I have to do it everytime I open Unity, otherwise I have to copy the Entity package and paste it to the Assets and uninstall it from the manager wich I dont find a clean and wise solution.

Anyways I've not been able to modify the package anymore to modify the "throw" as it is telling me now that the symbol '>' is not recognized, and the error persists even if I roll back the modification.
To conclude, I find somehow dificult the process of Debugging and this could be solved very easily as adding the variable {entity} to the Log.

$"A component with type {componentType} coul not be added to the entity {entity} with name {entityNameSomeHowHere}"

 

From different thread:

@Joachim_Ante would be good to change the name of "Dots Sample" to "Dots Shooter"

 

Thanks, a frank reply to the issue i posed. Still, as some of us are spending time on DOTS to understand it and be ready to use it for production when stable, it would be nice to have some better insight on samples updates. Many of us are somehow reinventing the wheel on animations package, AnimationCurve, dataflowgraph and texture skinning
You probably have most of that figuered out, it would be useful to know when we can see it in an update of Unity.Animation.Samples even before you do something on the more complex DotsSample.

To start, a simple refactor of Unity.Animation.Samples aligned with Entities 0.8 and Animations Package latest would be appreciated.
Thanks. Very interesting development ECS anyway. Quite a change from OOP for many of us.

 

https://twitter.com/unity3d/status/1251858148035616770

edit
New netcode and dots sample soon.

 

Nice chat, but very little info on timing for refactored DOTS Sample or Animation Samples demo.
Or of any new example in the short term.
In many serious dev projects I have been involved so far the issue of maintainability and refactoring (leave alone contunuos integration) to newr releases of underlying platforms has always been a very important one. Just think at MS Net Core and Google Angular evolution in the last 5 years...
Release management is part of the job.
I wonder if someone of us should take care of doing some version alignment and documentation of the Key Dots samples we have...
I am doing so for myself anyway... but we could do a collective effort...

 

Does anybody know why when a server has been running for a very long time such that the tick # is 200,000+ or a few hours, when clients join, it will freeze proportionally as long? It also causes the editor to freeze

 

I was wondering if the code for Networking found in the source folder of the DOTS sample project is a prototype of what is to come in the Net Code library. There are a lot of objects like the ghosted network entity that I felt was something that sounds like it was going to become part of the new Unet code. Just wondering, sorry if this has been asked or is obvious to some, it has just left me a bit confused if I'm going to have to write my own implementations of these objects.

 

Having a game as a sample is great, but I would rather prefer multiple projects showing off different features or, at least, a prohect with no distractions such as overcomplicated graphics. Even that red scene with balls makes it harder to focus on what is being showed off. Having small scenes showing off different techniques (locomotion, object picking, shooting, inventory, chat, etc.), or, at least, a level, built to present all these features one by one, even within active FPS, would teach us much better. Instead of awesome complex graphics, I would like to see gray level with only colored players and interactables, such as pickup items, levers, buttons, trigger zones, moving platforms, etc., each colored by its unique functionality

 

Hi,

How can I build this project for android/ios?

I really like the direction this project is heading, however, Unity build support for multiple platforms is one of the major contributing factors for developers adopting unity over other game engines. I would be really dissapointed if I couldn't build for mobile platforms with this sample.

Thank you

 

Please see my previous posts on page 2, It takes a good amount of fiddling to get the right packages to support android builds, possibly even change to URP from HDRP, and code refactoring

It's been half a year since the release of the DOTS Sample, but there hasn't been any official updates to it in the github repository. I'm still wondering why a long running hosted server will cause clients to lag on join/cause editor the freeze if joining

 

Hey,

Thanks for the reply. Is there any chance you could open source your changes with a forked repo so I could have a look? I'm an experienced developer but quite new to unity. I wouldn't mind having a look and seeing what I could do.

Thanks

 

What I don't understand in this sample is, where do the entities that live in the ClientGameWorld get copied / placed / updated into the Presentation World (which I assume is the Default World?)

 

It's currently broken since android doesn't seem to support HDRP, and URP doesn't seem to support gpu instancing (from what i read) correctly that's required for the animation system to work. There's some diffs for source changes I made to get later versions to work on the previous page.

I think i discovered the freezing issue cause. Luckily it seems one of the later versions of 2019.3.x must've made some kind of change to the garbage collector since now it freezes for less time on join (2019.3.15). Around 25 seconds instead of indefinite number of minutes.


Resulted in over 5 million calls to GC Alloc

At any rate the workaround for now is to adjust the number of collisionhistorybuffer worlds. Default is 16. Since I am currently not using the dots physics system in terms of detecting collisions (only used by abilityautorifle) I went ahead and set it to 0. Perhaps it could also be set to 1 to allow projectiles to be detected.

 

Is it even going to get another update?

 

https://twitter.com/unity3d/status/1291338150544060417
I've reached out to Unity on twitter, they say this month!

 

Ohhh Yes

I may be able to advance the development with a more updated version. With syncronized versions in the 2020.1 package manager it would be a plus, instead of adding the packages manually in the manifest.

 

Today is 28th August, this month is almost over, still no updates.

 

September 1st and still nothing, as expected .

 

Never give up hope... still a word from Unity would be nice

 

would like to hear an updates on this.

 

I really hope the delay is caused b the follow of this suggestion. BTW, it would make the samples much easier to follow the DOTS updates. No need to push heavy all-in-one project up to date with every single change

 

I know you guys are tired of hearing this asked, but since the IPO is finally out of the way, is there any chance that you'll stop holding back the DOTS sample? Or are you waiting for a dip in stock price to release it in order to drum up hype?

 

I wonder if investors relations will have a nor responding attitude as on this matter. Developers should be treated with more respect by Unity. Pretty sure money guys have it.

 

Hi @MartinGram @suneke. Any new update you can share with us? One feedback I want to give is have does dots sample team deeply battle test ComponentSystemGroup without using [DisableAutoCreation] attribute? I would like to see ComponentSystemGroup proves to truly usable out of the box by default without those [DisableAutoCreation] attribute etc to workaround or hack something. The current dots sample use so many of this [DisableAutoCreation] and make it quite hard for me to go through the code.

 

I, too, want you to prioritize a canonical sample that works with the latest release DOTS packages.

I cannot get a SINGLE DOTS example to work due to all the variations, version, etc...

Does anyone have a reference to any DOTS example project that actually works on 2019.4 (LTS, yes?) with the current packages?

 

@Cinqed
Don't use latest packages with Unity 2019, chances are they will not work.
Some latest packages require at least Unity 2020.x +
Look for packages dated late 2019.

Have you tried?
Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples

 

See https://forum.unity.com/threads/moving-dots-to-2020-1.910931/