Discussion Experimental Entities 0.51 (for Unity 2021) is available

For careful readers and update trackers, Experimental Entities 0.51 for Unity 2021 has been released.
It is expected to work for Unity 2020 also.






We may expect Unity officials soon, to announce this.
Edit: See official thread.
Experimental Entities 0.51 is Available

 

Why do you say 2021 only? The docs seem to suggest it also works with 2020. Haven't tried it yet personally, but it shows up in pacman in my 2020 project.

 

It ran fine for me in 2020.3. Upgraded entities before I upgraded Unity versions.

 

Well I perhaps misworded that.
I wanted appoint more, that it is not for 2022, so people won't get confused.
Thx for pointing out. I removed ONLY key word.

 

Thanks for the heads up!

 

EDIT: If at first you don't succeed: Refresh... refresh.... refresh... wait... refresh AND VIOLA! It works now for me at least

~~Interestingly Collections for LTS21 4f1 does not have a 1.3.1 version I wonder if I need to download that with 2020 first.~~

 

It has suprisinly few changes in the changelog.

 

Its main purpose is compatibility with 2021

 

Upgrading to 0.51 on 2020.3 is very easy, if you have any problem with collections, just add com.unity.collections separately in "Package Manager" (they added some kind of migration from "NativeHashMap" to "NativeParallelHashMap" which is nice it worked automatically for me). When upgrading to 2021.3 make sure that you are using 2021.3.4f, on 2021.3.1f I've had compilation issues.

 

I advice against upgarding to 0.51 at the moment. There are a lot of breaking issues atm - il2cpp doesn't work, constant code gen issues on code change requiring editor restarts etc.

 

YEP! Agreed! I would recommend getting a feel for Unity 2021, as the editor has some changes to it. But over all, adding entities makes it a pretty quick way to halt progress at the moment of trying it out Sadly.

 

I have 20% more ms in my performance tests.
Do you think I should report it as a bug?
I mean is everyone seeing the same thing?
I updated from 0.17

 

I'm seeing the same numbers in my stress test scene.
As Tertle has already mentioned, builds are broken. I'm getting

Code (CSharp):

1. ExecutionEngineException: Attempting to call method 'Unity.Entities.FastEquality+CompareImpl`1[[Unity.Physics.PhysicsWorldIndex, Unity.Physics, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]::CompareFunc' for which no ahead of time (AOT) code was generated.
2.   at Unity.Entities.FastEquality.Equals (System.Void* lhsPtr, System.Void* rhsPtr, Unity.Entities.FastEquality+TypeInfo typeInfo) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0
3.   at Unity.Entities.FastEquality.Equals[T] (T& lhs, T& rhs, Unity.Entities.FastEquality+TypeInfo typeInfo) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0
4.   at Unity.Entities.TypeManager.Equals[T] (T& left, T& right) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0
5.   at Unity.Entities.ManagedComponentStore.FindSharedComponentIndex[T] (System.Int32 typeIndex, T newData) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0

 

Mmmm my entities spawned from a converted prefab stopped rendering but converting a GO of that prefab to an entity using the editor makes it render as it should.
Any hint/idea/pointer u can think of?

 

Check for differences in the entity inspector.
Sounds like another bug though if it worked previously.

 

Have you tried select IL2CPP build type to Faster(Smaller) Build??
I use ECS0.17 in Unity 2021 and solved it.

 

Is this compatible with deferred lighting?

 

I had jobs debugger on. Thats why the 20% perf hit. That or restarting unity fixed.
Need to do more testing but my first build went tough and started without problems.

 

It's not ideal, but I just went into Temp folder, deleted the generated code folder, recompiled, and it was 'fixed', at least until the next time it occurs.

Just a possible, slightly more simple remedy for the time being.

 

Did same

And errors gone for now. Let us pray

 

Is there a sample project for entities 0.51 somewhere ?

 

I expect entities 0.50 samples should work just fine.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples

 

To answer my problem and let u know of what's happening.

I was incorrectly setting the "RenderingLayerMask" which never actually worked up until 0.50/0.51. My defect manifested as a fault once the feature was actually implemented.

 

I'm patient and will probably actually just wait for the ultra radioactive 1.0 which will set fire to my code! That is what we sign up for this soon I guess. Thanks for the heads up though as restarting editor is a bit tiring

 

Thanks for the information. What I've read so far is along those lines.

I wonder if by then we won't see a Unity Editor in two different flavors.
One of which would fully embrace the ECS pattern.
It smells like a rewrite from scratch.

 

For sure we will not, according to Unity. The conversion workflow is what Unity has decided for this 1.0

 

Hello,

I'm trying to use entities 0.51 in 2021.3.4f1 LTS on webGL, but I'm getting a missing assembly reference:

Code (CSharp):

1. (0,0): error System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'Unity.Collections.LowLevel.Unsafe.AtomicSafetyHandle' from assembly 'UnityEngine.CoreModule, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.

How can I fix this? I know entities 0.51 does not officially support webGL, but 0.17 is doing the job just fine on 2020 LTS. So I'm still holding out

Thanks!

 

Do you mean hybrid renderer? WebGL lacks the hardware support to use it.

 

No, we're using it just for the job system. I guess the compile error might stem from the renderer as well, but it seems it's part of the CoreModule. Once I upgrade to 0.51, the above error pops up.

 

The part about jobs not needing entities is true and a pretty awesome thing (have an ongoing project that does that). It'd also be nice if BlobAssets weren't inside the Entities packages. I feel like they are useful enough that I'd want to use Blobs + Jobs + Burst without ECS in a number of situations. Maybe they could live inside the Collections packages...

 

Just a little feedback to say that I took a chance and updated my project from Entities 0.17 to 0.51.

A big thank you to @tertle for his help on Discord, he is a good adviser.

The main difficulty I had was that I first updated the packages before following the update guide, it seemed like a no-brainer before modifying the sources. I didn't necessarily expect to have to remove packages like the DOTS Editor and the hundreds of errors that came with it were unclear.

On the other hand, I didn't have this problem with com.unity.platforms.windows which seems to have uninstalled itself (by itself?) when updating com.unity.platforms.
I always have a bit of trouble with the package manager which, I find, is not the best UX when it comes to unexpected cascade package updates, wrong dependencies or incompatible Unity version.

My source ECS being relatively simple, I didn't have as much trouble as I had anticipated.

I used the "Add missing partial keyword to systems" tool, convenient and without hassle.

I was expecting a performance gain or possibly, as I read in some places, a performance loss, but at first glance the result is strictly the same.

Finally, being able to use the DOTS tool windows will certainly make the task of parallelizing what I have left on the main thread easier.

Half a day and it build without mistakes.
If you're not sure, it might be worth a shot, especially since the manual is a bit better.

I started DOTS mainly for Havok without any notion of Burst, simply because, among other things, the manual doesn't mention it. It seems obvious, however, there is a world to know before daring to use DOTS and its performance by Default. I think now is a good time to learn it.