ECS - Rebuild of Unity's upcoming - Entity Component System - FREE

Well at the moment: if you have components which changes often use classes (position,...)
If you have components which stays the same use struct because of faster access.

 

Ah dang :/ Thanks for giving it a shot though! Fingers crossed that the Unity team has some magic code up their sleeves that is able to solve that issue.

 

I think you can ignore this for now. This issue can only be solved new compiler tech and something like a ref to a struct. In this regard, setting lots of structs takes so long that the approach costs more than it gains. On that note, isn't a ref struct already possible in 2018.1?

Anyway, I'm using classes 99%, which solves the issue and your ECS is really fun to use with it. If you don't have entity counts 100k+ you are safe.

 

Yes I do the same for my project.

ref struct are part of C# 7. I didn't test 2018.1 yet. So I don't know about the support.

Anyway I'm going forward to improve my framework. But I need some practice with it

 

@Spy-Shifty

Could you please clarify current best practice with regards to classes / structs. The templates indicate that struct is the way to go, but it seems this is not to be the case for the time being...
- Are Classes best practice for your current state of ECS? (faster now)
- Are Structs best practice once Unity implements this natively? (faster later)

 

I can only speak about my ECS.

Well, if you have not thousends of entities, just use classes.
At the current stage, structs are only faster at reading not writing.
So if you have Components that won't change often/sparsely over the livetime of an entity, you can use structs.
But if you have a component that frequently changes (like position) use a class.

I only can imagine how the upcoming C# Jobsystem and the Unity ECS performs. But the preview show us great performance in the use of structs.

I believe the key lays in the NativeArray... and the special compiler.

 

Do classes have to implement IColonable or only if wrapped in the Editor?

Code (CSharp):

1.     #if UNITY_EDITOR
2.         [Serializable]
3.         public class PositionComponent : IComponent, ICloneable
4.         {
5.             public Vector2 position;
6.        
7.             public object Clone()
8.             {
9.                 return MemberwiseClone();
10.             }
11.         }  
12.        
13.         [DisallowMultipleComponent]
14.         public class Position : ComponentWrapper<PositionComponent>{}  
15.     #else
16.         [Serializable]
17.         public class PositionComponent : IComponent
18.         {
19.             public Vector2 position;
20.         }
21.     #endif

 

There is support for some C#7 features, I'm not sure if "ref-locals" is what you're referring to?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/c-7-support.512661/#post-3362532

There is also Tuples which I imagine might help a bit?

 

Oh ok I didn't knew that. I'll check it out.

 

Yes, only for the wrapper.

I wasn't sure what happens with linked references, if you initialize a gameobject and so on. (I didn't want to think of it a lot.. I was just lazy )

This might be outdated... I'll check if we can remove the ICloneable interface.

 

Hi there...just checking if you are still working on the system...

 

Hey Spy-Shifty, it looks pretty nice!
I really like having something before Unity releases their stuff.

Comming from mobile applications I would like to give some feedback that moves me away of this approach.

1) I never like seeing using System.Linq; Comming from iOS I only had bad experiences with Linq, and wouldn't recommend it in any project using AOT.

2) I love IoC, but I hate having Dependency Injection using reflection. Again comming from mobile platforms Its not nice having to resolve things using reflection here and there.

I would leave the (Dependency Injection / Reflection) on a per project choice, and not embbed it into a ECS solution.

Cheers

 

Hey guys, just watched the keynote.

Will systems support injection of multiple kinds of tuples as well as explicitly declaring the tuples? Right now this parallel track arrays that happen to be of the same length is a bit of a hack. Besides, right now, if I understood everything correctly, each system can only work with only one kind of tuples at the same time. This severely limits the potential complexity of systems. I propose defining tuples (I prefer calling them aspects) explicitly, and allowing systems, in a similar attribute-injection manner to receive lists of different tuples. Such systems will allow more complex behaviours "marrying" 2, 3, 4 etc. tuple kinds with each other.

Something like this (the syntax is a bit made up):

Code (CSharp):

1. [Aspect]
2. public struct FlyingAspect
3. {
4.    [Component] public Transform Transform;
5.    [Component] public Flyable Flyable;
6. }
7.  
8. [Aspect]
9. public struct CrawlingAspect
10. {
11.    [Component] public Transform Transform;
12.    [Component] public Crawlable Crawlable;
13. }
14.  
15. [System]
16. public class HuntingSystem
17. {
18.    [Aspects] public AspectList<FlyingAspect> FlyingAspects;
19.    [Aspects] public AspectList<CrawlingAspect> CrawlingAspects;
20.  
21. public override void OnUpdate()
22. {
23.    // Now kiss :)
24.    // Let everything that crawls hunt everything that flies.
25. }
26. }

Hope this helps.

 

It already supports it!

Code (CSharp):

1. class MySystem : ComponentSystem {
2.     [InjectTuple("groupA")]
3.     ComponentArray<ComponentA> componentA;
4.     ComponentArray<ComponentC> componentC;
5.  
6.     [InjectTuple("groupB")]
7.     ComponentArray<ComponentA> componentA;
8.     ComponentArray<ComponentB> componentB;
9. }

 

Ok, that's good to know! Sorry for not paying enough attention!

 

Well I won't change this for now.

 

Is this new ECS the beginning of the end of the old component system, or will they co-exist?

 

I believe this will co-exist, because not everthing should be wrapped to ECS. Sometimes it is more easy to write a single script to change the behaviour. You should use ECS for frequent used behaviour like physics and animation and only change them in a script (as it is currently!). But also health and collision should be wrapped to a component to access them in a system, still this is not possible (you can't define your own component (health) or system (collision) to acces them).
The benefit of ECS is to lay your data in a cpu cache friendly way and reduce debug time because all functionality lays down in the systems.

 

I might be a noob, but I can't seem to get this compiling in my project. I just added the ECS folder to my project and I get 19 errors when compiling:

Code (CSharp):

1.     Assets/ECS/Core/EntityManager.cs(10,6): error CS0616: `ECS.InjectableDependencyAttribute': is not an attribute class
2.    Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectableDependencyAttribute.cs(12,6): error CS0641: Attribute `System.AttributeUsageAttribute' is only valid on classes derived from System.Attribute
3.     Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectableDependencyAttribute.cs(15,16): error CS1729: The type `Attribute' does not contain a constructor that takes `0' arguments
4.     Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectDependencyAttribute.cs(8,6): error CS0641: Attribute `System.AttributeUsageAttribute' is only valid on classes derived from System.Attribute
5.    Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectDependencyAttribute.cs(9,18): error CS1729: The type `Attribute' does not contain a constructor that takes `0' arguments
6.    Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectTupleAttribute.cs(8,6): error CS0641: Attribute `System.AttributeUsageAttribute' is only valid on classes derived from System.Attribute
7.     Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectTupleAttribute.cs(13,16): error CS1729: The type `Attribute' does not contain a constructor that takes `0' arguments
8.     Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectTupleAttribute.cs(17,16): error CS1729: The type `Attribute' does not contain a constructor that takes `0' arguments
9.     Assets/ECS/Core/Injection/InjectTupleAttribute.cs(22,16): error CS1729: The type `Attribute' does not contain a constructor that takes `0' arguments
10.     Assets/ECS/Core/SystemRoot.cs(10,6): error CS0616: `ECS.InjectableDependencyAttribute': is not an attribute class
11.    Assets/ECS/Core/SystemRoot.cs(16,10): error CS0616: `ECS.InjectDependencyAttribute': is not an attribute class

 

I need more information to help you!
What Unity version do you use?
Did you downloaded it completely?
Is it an empty project?

...

 

Sorry! It's not an empty project and we're using Unity 2017.1.2p3 on MacOS

EDIT:

It works fine on an brand new project, will investigate!

EDIT2:

Was an issue with my code! Woo awesome work man!!!

 

Hello there , i had been seeking for a ECS in unity and i come to this doubt wheres is the differences between: Svelto.ECS, Entitas.ECS and your ECS aproach?

 

This was ask one or two times in this thread!
Please search for the post!

If you have further questions please ask me.

 

I have a general design question here. I love the ECS approach and this implementation is stellar. I'm am struggling with where to put this in a top-down RPG game when you have multiple scenes. You want your user data to cross scenes and some scene data to persist when you leave a scene and come back.

Where would you put this ECS tool? Should there be an initializer in every scene? I think there _has_ to be because you can't instantiate game objects in the current scene if you stick a DontDestroyOnLoad on the ECS, because the ECS will live in it's own little scene. Any ideas?

 

Well you can still use scriptable objects to store data persistent between scenes. So each scene has its own controller and an entity or even a field in the conrtoller to store the reference to that scriptable object that holds the states...

 

Take a look at https://github.com/Leopotam/ecs
Lastest tests shows how fast is it https://github.com/echeg/unityecs_speedtest

 

Because I'm a lazy bastard I wrote a little F# script to generate components and systems (sans logic of course). It enforces some standard naming conventions, sorry for that
If you're interested, you can find it here: https://github.com/jheiling/BrokenBricksECSGenerator

 

hi , i have question . how can i install ecs on my unity3d ?

 

First enable .Net 4.x for the Scripting Runtime Version under the player settings.

Now go to:
Windows -> package manager
Under the tab All
Install IncrementalCompiler first
than install Entities
you need both to work well!

done

For more information visit this forum there is all you need:
https://forum.unity.com/forums/entity-component-system-and-c-job-system.147/

 

Hi Spy-Shifty,
How would you compare your ECS to current Unity ECS, in terms of features and performance?

 

I don't develop it anymore! Use Unity!

 

Maybe better to add something to README at github project that development was stopped?