Discussion How can v1 of unity DOTS be released, when you can't have animations?

As a game developer, I just jumped into to peek unity DOTS package (something I've long awaited for) and I'm pretty disappointed.

I still don't entirely see the point of it without some sort of core animation system? What's the point of spawning 1000 game entities when you can't even animate them without 3rd party tools that are all in early or abandoned state.

I understand that with DOTS you can do other things, like transform or rotate object but it just feels a bit ... pointless?

Am I missing some key feature or use case for DOTS otherwise? The entire documentation for DOTS object are for very simple game ideas (boids algo, a tank that rotate polys) but nothing that's core to some nice game development. Even a massive Mario game wouldn't work, how can you animate anything in there?

 

There are thousands of other use cases for Entities in many cases, but Unity is currently working on a DOTS Animation system as well. You can check out what is in the works on their product roadmap.
Entities 1.0 lays the basic groundwork, while other systems are being worked on as we speak to be DOTS compatible. By releasing Entities 1.0 Unity is giving devs access to their ECS to do with as they wish, and many have extended it to fit their needs. However, Unity is also expanding it throughout their engine, so watch for those updates as well.

 

Animation package was long time been announced, that is not the priority of DOTS 1.0. It may be something however, in upcoming year or so. But not guarantee. I think DOTS team did mention, they got something in works. Just don't take me for a word.

Regarding DOTS state, it didn't stop early adopters, to create amazing games.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/share-our-dots-showcases.1010215/

Number of them already been released, using some DOTS packages.

Further more, when OP mentioning DOTS, is confusing with ECS. Where ECS is part of DOTS. And DOTS contains number of API. Some like jobs, burst, ECS. Saying that, each package can be used int the product seprately, or in conjunctions with others.

As te results, many developers used just jobs, and burs, to heavy lift complex calculations. Other stuff like animations were perfectly fine using native UnityEngine animation API.

There are also various ways of doing animations. Including way of baking into textures, for high performance.

Hence lack of animation API is no a show stopper really.

 

Latest update
https://forum.unity.com/threads/animation-status-update-q2-2023.1445425/

 

Have you looked at their larger samples like Megacity or their NetCode racer? Have you looked at any of their promotional materials about commercial games that have had success with ECS?

As someone very deeply invested in providing one of these "third party tools", would you mind elaborating on how you came to this conclusion?

 

I think that maybe too many developers nowadays think in high level abstractions and forget that programming is all about making a series of data transformations. This framework compliments that mindset and supercharges it through multi threading and code optimizations(burst) while still being high level programming.

Sure, more examples would be nice, but I think that if you know how the data transformation process works then specific code examples become less important. You only have to understand how the data transformations work. In contrast to making code architectures using the MonoBehaviour workflow, with this you're not really thinking about how the code is structured because it's a left to right process, so the data transformations become more visible. It's like a conveyor belt of machines. If you know how one of those machines on the conveyor belt works, then you know how all of them works. Input -> Transformation -> Output

I recommend checking out this guide https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples/#learning-dots