FYI: Can create entities in Monobehaviours no problem.

I tinkered a little with creating entities outside of a System. Found that creating entities was no problem at all, and being able to do that in Coroutines makes me feel a lot more at home with ECS. I think for now I'll probably do all UI/Player Input/Instantiation inside Monobehaviours, with actual computation and stuff inside Systems. These entities are being moved by the Job system, so it doesn't appear to be messing up multithreading or w/e.

Some example code.

public class EnemySpawner : MonoBehaviour {

    void Start () {

        StartCoroutine(SpawnEnemies());

    }

    IEnumerator SpawnEnemies()

    {

        WaitForSeconds wait = new WaitForSeconds(5);

        while(true)

        {

            NativeArray<Entity> enemies = new NativeArray<Entity>(5000, Allocator.Temp);

            EntityManager em = World.Active.GetOrCreateManager<EntityManager>();

            em.CreateEntity(Archetypes.basicEnemy, enemies);

            for (int i = 0; i < enemies.Length; i++)

            {

                em.SetComponentData<Position>(enemies[i], new Position { Value = Random.insideUnitSphere*20});

                em.SetComponentData<Speed>(enemies[i], new Speed { Value = Random.Range(1f,3f)});

                em.SetSharedComponentData<MeshInstanceRenderer>(enemies[i], Renderers.basicEnemy);

            }

            enemies.Dispose();

            yield return wait;

        }

    }

}

If any Unity guys reading this, How friendly are Monobehaviours/ECS going to be in the future? I really like this approach -- It's like taking the best of both worlds from Data-Oriented Design and Objected Oriented design.

 

High level dirty gameplay code spawns low level ECS goodness, I can see it become a thing, and it's probably easy to encase in a Helper ECS.Spawn(tons of parameters);

 

Is that the only way to process things like Collisions? I was going to emit entities for collision events in MonoBehaviour, and then process them in ECS.

 

@Gabriel I can Imagine there to be a standard components CollisionListener and TriggerListener that when added would make sure that Unity's system will add collision components to those entities when collisions occur.

 

I'm my game I need to spawn a limited number of enemies because I just deactivate and activate them, in a polling system... My entities can have these monobehavior scripts? Or everything inside of theses entities need to be specialized ECS components?

For example, my enemies have an script that keep checking the distance from the player, if the player go too far I deactivate this enemy and list it to be reutilize ahead. But I do not figured ou how to do this in ECS. Or some behaviors can continue to be regular unity components?