How to share a cached array between systems? The array size is not fixed.

Hello Unity Forum Members!

We want to share a cached array between systems. Unfortunately, the size of this array is not fixed.

We have a puzzle game where we check for connected gamepieces/blocks/tiles. If you're familiar with A* or path finding algorithms, it is similar.

In the past we would do this with Dictionaries (position keys and gamepiece values) and HashSets (to track positions we have already checked.)

In ECS, we avoid Dictionaries, HashSets, nested loops, or .Contains() calls. Instead, we have a pre-processing step where we cache a map of every gamepiece by using a 2 dimensional array. This allows us to do direct lookups of gamepieces using the position as an index, instead of using a nested loop to search for the right gamepiece.

I would like to have several JobComponentSystems reuse this cached map. What would be the best way to share this array between systems? I would use a ComponentData to store the map except the size of the 2 dimensional array changes based on the size of the level. ComponentData needs to know the size of the array ahead of time.

How do you share a re-sizable cached map between systems?

EDIT: I saw a suggestion to inject one system into another system. Isn't this very anti-ECS? Storing cached data in a system?

 

Have you considered DynamicBuffers attached to entities?

First part of the documentation for DynamicBuffers:

the rest of the document can be found here https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...ster/Documentation/content/dynamic_buffers.md

 

I was not familiar with dynamic buffers, but I know what I'm trying out tomorrow!

 

Still going to try it, but now I have questions about how these are stored in memory.

Should I treat them as reference types with all the performance implications that has?

Or if multiple buffers are stored continuously in memory, won't it cause fragmentation once a buffer needs to resize?