Ecs Roadmap?

Is there a clear road map ? so we can know what will be the order of upcoming features?
right now we dont know if features we need will show up next week, next month or next year, It's making it really hard to make any kind of decision.

 

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026146/

 

I must admit, I didn't really get much information at all from that talk =). For a roadmap talk, I expected some nice targets for specific feats but got mainly "things are coming at some point before 2022".

They did mention some things that are going to arrive this year tho.

 

Not even that, "The 2d team are working right now", or, here is a vague graph showing that something will come out some time in the next 3 years.

I would love a real roadmap, I dont want dates, as asking for that is unrealistic, things change and go out of scope, but I would love to know what are the teams working on right now, what can we expect to be added in the next months.

 

I just jumped through it looking for a roadmap and is this it, pure ECS/DOTS circa 2021-2022?

There are about seven major game systems that need to be pure ECS or DOTS, Audio, Rendering, Navigation, Input, Netcode, AI and I was hoping for something more like this...

 

Why is the unity logo sprouting smaller logos

 

Yup, that's it, that's all they gave us as far as I know.

 

Wow, I better get DOTS out of my mind until 2022. I jumped on Unity because of their announcement last year. Why promote something so heavily that is far from being finished.

Yeah, I know. It better than nothing and the future will be great. At this point, I don't really care about DOTS anymore and instead, they should fix the clunky Editor first and bring DOTS by 2025. I'm suffering from the getting-slower and the bad UX design everyday. It can help improve the productivity right now rather than 3 years later.

Will they ever listen? They say they listen but I don't think so because the clunky Editor is been sitting like that past 10 years. Let me rephrase it. Will they ever do something about it?, rather than doing some cosmetic changes?

 

But they do listen? Afaik, people who have used the engine for years are in general happy how the editor itself works. IMO they do need to make the editor perform better on more complex scenes and make new additions to integrate more seamlessy but they are already on it.

According to the DOTS talk, Unity wants to make ECS eventually a lot like current gameobjects work in the Unity Editor so don't expect huge changes for this part (why change the part that made Unity popular and easy to use?).

 

Have you tried the UI System Previews Sub https://forum.unity.com/forums/ui-systems-previews.178/

 

Sorry to revive an old(ish) thread but does anyone know if there have been any updates on the roadmap?
Or is the production release still somewhere around 2022?

 

I expect we'll get a roadmap update on Unite Copenhagen in a month

 

I could live-tease the roadmap while I will be over there if you all can't wait for the talks being available on youtube.

 

Is this actually published anywhere? Or do we have to comb through Youtube videos hoping we find vLatest?

 

First google hit:

This is 2 years old though. Newer roadmap talk didn't discuss about ECS either. And we are still waiting for that ECS roadmap etc blog post that was supposed to be out last year

 

They seem to be at DOTS 0.5 internally: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/5601
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/5586

Last I remember the public version was 0.18, so I hope the development is at full speed internally.

 

I wouldn't read too much into this - DOTS != Entities
That said they are definitely working away at it internally
(Also last public entities release is 0.17)

You've missed the actual info in the pull request though!

Code (CSharp):

1. Added: Define ENABLE_HYBRID_RENDERER_V2 by default for Hybrid Renderer 0.14.0 and newer

Because currently 0.11 is the latest release

 

Have you seen any hits anywhere of what they are working on internally?

 

Bit of a pointless question - if I happened to know something I couldn't disclose it!

There's plenty of info on the forums about changes entities is going through - source generators, new memory management, etc

Also check out the non-entities forums (e.g. Netcode) there's been some info posted in the last few months as well.

I do find Unity's public silence annoying though. It really doesn't take much effort to quickly explain what's going on.

 

I came back to this today when I noticed the last release of Unity Physics was January 18th. I'm stuck on this (which I'm only ever using for some raycasts), and if I try to update the collections package to 1.0, there are compilation errors with Jobs 0.8.something.

This got me wondering if it's abandoned or not. There's a tangled mess of dependencies between preview packages which aren't being updated with any cadence relative to each other. I'm stuck with old versions of foundational packages (collections, jobs, burst, mathematics) because Physics. If Physics is actually being abandoned, fine, no problem; I can invest a few weeks into rewriting raycasts or just use GameObjects. But it seems like a lot of ECS is in this limbo state of "maybe abandoned or maybe the future of Unity" without any clear messaging around it.

 

It's not abandoned; Unity just decided to not release new DOTS packages until 2022, and they can't share details as to why precisely (it's pointless to look through the thread; they never gave any clarifications).

Presumably -and this is just a theory- it could be linked to requiring Unity 2022.1 features in order to continue DOTS development, and it would've taken too much effort to backport these internal engine changes to 2021? Or maybe they simply need to take a step back and refactor some things without the pressure of keeping compatibility with previous releases.

But you can see the DOTS physics devs still active & talking about future additions in the DOTS physics forums.

 

Spoiler: Conspiracy Theory

Who knows, it could also be because of legal reasons now that Unity is a public company.
Maybe releasing updates on what is going internally at Unity could make anyone here reading about it into a inside trader if they buy shares. I am not a lawyer and this is a offshot theory, but who knows what kinds of legal issues could be now that they went public. It might be too much of a coincidence that they went silent on about everything all at once about at the same it went public?
Didn't they stop talking nearby October last year? Again, I know very little about the subject, but here is what I found googling about the shares https://www.fool.com/quote/nyse/u/

 

The team I'm working on has decided to abandon ECS until Unity provides more information.

The silence from Unity about ECS is a huge disservice to game developers. It's unacceptable.

 

Thanks!

That sounds like a polite way of saying it's abandoned in its current form and whatever comes next will not be source-compatible. Time to look for a new raycast solution!

 

The patent was filed march 2020...

https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageN...nity%2BIPR%2522%26RS=AN/%2522Unity%2BIPR%2522

 

I have already voiced the theory that ECS may also become part of unity core. This means that many internal core modules / packages can also access ECS. With the example of UI Toolkit, that's already been part of 2021.2.

 

Is that true?Or just someone's imagination.Im just waitting for ecs1.0.0 for 2 years.Cant imagine when it would be part of unity core

 

This is only a theory, but if ECS is to be the future, then this step will come at some point, and I had felt that ECS core is very stable for an experimental package. Perhaps ECS will be included as a core module in the course of the 2022.1 alpha cycle.
But it can also be that ECS core 1.0 is planed to using .NET standard 2.1 or .NET6.

 

Weird to see that they are filing to patent some of the ECS methods. I'm not an expert on the details of how software patents work exactly but I'd be a little surprised if very similar things aren't already in the public domain & easily searchable on github or elsewhere?

 

As far as I understand, patents aren't that broad. Scroll down to the claims section to find out what specific "inventions" the patent applies to. Note that the dependent claims (ones that refer to other claims) are used to narrow down the independent claims (like an AND operation, rather than an OR).

Mostly looks like they're patenting their specific memory model in anticipation of other engines implementing it verbatim. Obviously, there's tons of prior art out there related to ECS, but probably not a lot that looks like Unity's specific implementation of ECS.

Still, an asshole move. As everyone in this subforum is no doubt painfully aware, the difficulty of getting software to work well lies in the implementation, not the idea. Software patents really need to go.

 

Well, would the patent make it easier for them to protect the engine while at the same time releasing the source code for the internals and whatnot?

 

Not really. The code is already protected by copyright.

 

Considering patent trolling exists, I can totally understand Unity filing that patent to protect themselves in the future.

Of course the software patenting shouldn't even exist in the first place but that's not the world we live in..

 

Yeah and to avoid another Improbable situation where some dev just takes all your work wholesale.

 

That's not entirely fair. An asshole move would be if they started going after other studios with the patent. Until they do that, it's just protecting themselves from patent trolls and their brand.

 

Is good that somehow protect themself if the patent is correct. Around Unity 4 or Unity 5 I suggested an idea on feedback to create and run all the game super fast running inside the CPU cache. Like why C64 was able to do so much using peek and poke and for a Unity very simple game we need 30Mb by default on the build. The answer later thanking in an email (presume general) adding that feedbacks trigger Super Tiny and ECS in the roadmap.

Feedback actually works.

In This forum, we ask Unity not to show too much WIP because generates too much noise. People complaining that the alpha stage is taking too long to be completed and many bugs, incompatibility, etc... My feelings are that they are just more reserved right now because we ask exactly that.

Roadmap:
https://unity.com/roadmap/unity-platform