DOTSNET - High Performance Unity ECS Networking from the creator of Mirror!

(Demo) (Asset Store) (Docs) (Discord)

“In the information age, the barriers just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.” ― John D. Carmack, Masters of Doom

Introduction
DOTSNET brings easy to use, WoW/EvE scale AAA Networking to Unity.

Embracing Unity's new Data Oriented Technology Stack, DOTSNET can handle both millions of entities & thousands of connections, with unmatched stability & ease of use.

It's fun to work with, it's orders of magnitude faster than any other Unity networking solution, and comes with over 90% test coverage by default.

MMOs with epic LotR scale battles. Infinite Sci-Fi space simulations. DOTSNET.

 

Ive been waiting for the power of DOTS.

 

It will arrive in around 14 days

 

Nice, in time for another chat on my stream?

 

Hey, sorry didn't get to your DM yet.
Will finish the work I have been putting off while releasing DOTSNET, then get back to you.
I'll probably have time

 

This looks fabulous performance...

 

Looks like excellent work!

 

Documentation updated: added most of the API properties, functions & descriptions.
Check it out while waiting to have an easier start.

Around 12 days remaining until Asset Store team should review it.
Working on V1.1 already

 

Will this be free like Mirror?

 

Maybe some day.

 

What is the cost, and are you provided full source?

 

$100, but price could go in either direction later.
Mirror being $0 made sense because it's a community fork. But after 3 years, nearing 4000 commits and >6 people working on it, not even 1 of us can work on it full time with the donations.

Yes, full C# source. Note that it uses my Apathy low level transport, which was developed in native C. The native C project isn't included, but you can use other C# transports too and native C might no be needed much longer.

 

Here is the Code Coverage report.
There are around 200 unit tests, covering 90% of the code.
The higher the coverage, the lower the probability of bugs.

As far as I know, Mirror already had the highest code coverage from all Unity networking solutions: 50%.
I have never seen a game networking library with 90% code coverage before. That's basically unheard of.
This is what I mean with AAA quality

 

so.. what can i do with this ? c# bare bones can also hold 500k connections without fancy DOTS
lets say it does state sync..

what about snapshot interpolation?, lag compensation?, delta compression? (a must in this scales), events?,
authoritative? (if so do you use HPC# physics or Havok or custom physics)
entity freezing?, can set entity ownership ? does it have packet priority (for near and far entities)?
editor codegen? (but guess i'm being spoiled with this one)

btw hope i'm reading it wrong but

head of line blocking will be insane with this amount of synced properties (in real world connection not local test)
not even mentioning congestion control or exponential back-off problem

or you just send low amount of packets and slow down the battle pace like WoW does
(good luck with that for new games in 2020)

it does look fast but has the same problems like the new disrupt network (which is also very fast)..
I respect new network systems as I know how hard it is to make them and kudos for that
but to be honest it feels more like a dots network prototype rather then a full networking stack

 

For V1, you can sync ECS entities over the network and I think it's easy to use

Sure, outside of Unity 500k connections are doable.
Inside of Unity, it's a lot more difficult.

The reason why you would want both server & client in the same Unity project is an order of magnitude improvement in productivity. Most multiplayer games don't fail because of performance - in fact, a lot of the popular games like DayZ have quite poor performance. Most games fail because multiplayer is hard. Having both server & client in Unity & sharingdata/code makes it a lot easier.

If you decide to do that, then you have two options: Mono or ECS. For Mono, there are already a lot of networking libraries to choose from. For ECS, the only one I can use today is Unity's netcode - which seems to target ~80 CCU shooters.

I am more interested in WoW/EvE type of large worlds, which is where DOTSNET comes in. Without any real optimizations, it can already handle a lot more networked entities than Mirror simply because it uses ECS.

Will be very interesting to see what's possible with more optimizations over the next few years.
Do you have Discord? Would be interesting to discuss the topics you mentioned

 

Yup donation is never enough AGREED

 

@vis2k
We have already developed networking system with DOTS netcode.
Is there still some benefits compared to DOTSNET?
It looks DOTSNET is totally different from netcode. We'd like to create Open world FPS/TPS.

 

If you already use Unity's netcode and it works, then keep using it

 

Still pending review. Asset Store should get to it either today or next week hopefully.

I already finished V1.1 while waiting. Changelog:

V1.1 will be submitted immediately after V1.0 release. To get started, it's probably better to wait for V1.1.

Unity.Physics Demo: (looks more fun when playing)


Pong Demo:


Chat Demo:

 

This looks neat. Does it work with WebGL?

 

It can use different low level (= packet sending) transports.
The current one in V1.0 will run on Windows/Mac/Linux.
For WebGL you'll need websockets. Will add one later

 

Hi @vis2k will this support encryption?
This kind of thing, I found this old link >> https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnetEncryptionExample

 

He doesn't tend to have encryption out of the box and usually expects you to implement that yourself if you need it.

 

DOTSNET should be reviewed by the Asset Store team any day now..

Encryption needs to happen on transport layer, and you can use any transport of your choice again.
I might add an encrypted transport later on. First goal is top optimize for max CCU

 

Hey,
Great stuff, Have a question ,
My game right now is on the mono solution and i want it to stay that way ,
But I also like DOTSNET and wants to have a server implemented with that ,

so can I just use the DOTSNET and its ECS thing on the server while the main game is working with mono for sending and receiving data ?

Thank u

 

Thanks. Will look forward to that

 

It's possible, sure.
It's going to be a whole lot of work though.
If you already use Mono, it's probably best to keep using it. ECS is still in preview.

Imho finish your Mono game and use ECS for the next game 5 years from now

 

Check out Mirror This one here is for ECS, which is Unity's new data oriented technology.

 

Rejected after 21 days because documentation.txt links to a google doc.

Good news is that I resubmitted V1.2 instead of V1.0, so as soon as Unity Asset Store accepts it, you'll already have the version that you should use anyway

 

DOTSNET is now on the Asset Store!

Enjoy!

 

Cool! I have just decided to use mirror after comparing with the other options. Then you release this same day . As a Unity noob creating his first Unity network project I should probably stay with Mirror for now right? I had a look at the uMMORPG since they use Mirror. Are they going to move to DOTSNET?

 

Yes, better to stay with Mirror.
MonoBehaviour is still easier for beginners. DOTSNET uses ECS, which is still in preview and has some more advanced concepts.

 

Hi,

Looks promising. Regarding the transport - how complicated it is to change for example to LiteNetLib and reliable/unreliable UDP?

I don't want to buy if it's not possible without rewriting half of the thing.

Thanks,
- J

 

Very easy. You just need to drop them in and fill out one wrapper for the server:


And one for the client:


And then drag them onto the NetworkServer/NetworkClient GameObject.

LiteNetLib will probably be used by a lot of people, so I'll add that myself in one of the next updates.

 

Ho! Nice!

I will buy and test it out in the evening! : )

Cheers,
- J

 

On the server, do we have to launch a new instance of services for each mission/game/world. Or we can creating multiple worlds utilizing the DOT/ECS's Worlds?

 

Right now it has one ClientWorld and one ServerWorld.
The goal is to have multiple ServerWorlds.

I just need to look into it in one of the upcoming versions. I don't think we need many (if any) changes since they are memory separate anyway. Will just need to tell the server which scene to load for which world

 

V1.3 pending review: Apathy 20x performance improvement!

10k Demo + Apathy now runs with max visibility range at 30-40FPS on my laptop:
https://gyazo.com/bd97b7913ee68ed6b5fdf8966f88d132

Time for a 100k Demo


Changelog:

 

Would there be any way to implement some form of Wifi Direct so that devices could connect and communicate without a router? Would be an instant purchase from me, as you'd be the only one implementing something I've been exhaustively searching for, for ages. Being able to connect locally without a router .... dude. Playing with the boys on the bus, without using data ... come on. lol

Seriously, though.

 

Sounds like too much of an edge case for me to implement.
But you can use any transport that you want, so feel free to add your own

 

Just wanted to say I got a laugh seeing your quote of the asset store's official terms regarding refunds at the end of your asset description, while Unity has chosen to put "Refunds - We've got you covered" on every asset now, in seeming contradiction with their own terms of use.

Glad you got this out this week.

 

Automated serialization is a huge usability improvement. Here is what a message looked like before:


Now:

 

Is there something similar to [SyncVar] Attribute here?

 

[SyncVar] only makes sense in MonoBehaviour world because we can get all NetworkBehaviour components and find all SyncVars in them. That's not possible in ECS world as far as I understand.

For DOTSECS you create a BroadcastSystem for each component that you want to serialize. Check out the built in NetworkTransformServerSystem to see a good example. It will even run in a Job soon

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.netcode@0.1/manual/ghost-snapshots.html
Maybe it helps~

 

Sending the whole chunk is kinda cool.
Probably won't scale though. If you are working on an MMO with 20 components like inventory, equipment, etc. then you don't want to send the whole thing every few frames.

 

Working on the next version.

InterestManagement was reimplemented without managed code and is now fully Burst compiled.
It's 57x faster and could be run every single frame if needed.


Benchmark with 10k Entities, Interest Management running every single frame:

• Before: 339ms per frame: https://gyazo.com/255f3eea83f98096bf59515ea1fe0007
• After: 5.89ms per frame: https://gyazo.com/b6fb02ccfb8365f5bdda745071c3adae

 

@vis2k looking at the stats in the gifs you posted, it looks like you’re not batching the materials - not sure if that was intententional, but if not you’ll get even better frame rates if you enable batching. That said, asset looks awesome, I need to start saving up

 

Thanks for the tip, that's awesome.
They already used the same materials and meshes while still drawing 32k batches.
With GPU Instancing enabled it's a lot faster:


Thanks man!

 

V1.5 pending review. Major performance update.
10k Entities are running at 40 FPS on my Laptop.
Targeting 100k next.