Is it Good Time for using DOTS in Sprite based Production Project?

Hi there,

I developed a project last year that draw 10k 2d Sprites but i was not happy with the performance issues.

I saw this video

and thought if 3d objects can be drawn/manipulated/animated with such speed then 2D Sprite should have no issue too.

So I want to come back to that project again and wants to know if

I can use DOTS in its current state and draw/animate/manipulate those 10k objects simultaneously every frame and whether it will work fine on mobile platforms or not? Can i use it for a production purposes or should i wait longer?

Thanks

 

I say do it. Be bold.

 

DOTS currently does not have native sprite rendering, at least not the DOTS on this forum (Project Tiny does, but the technologies haven't been fully merged yet). So if you want to be bold and make sprites work here, then you'll probably want to make a GameObjectConversionSystem that builds a dictionary of Sprites and meshes and use that to convert SpriteRenderers into RenderMeshes.

 

Keep in mind that there aren't many tutorials, samples or documentation for DOTS, so If the initial development time is important for your project and you are not familiar with DOTS I wouldn't recommend it.

Also keep in mind that whatever system for physics/rendering/animation you make you will probably spend some time later migrating when Unity release the existing physics/rendering/animation system for DOTS.

 

More than enough

 

Sorry for lack of knowledge, is instantiating and moving sprites will be different than instantiating and moving bullets in that youtube video?
i thought both things are the same.

 

Yes development time is important and i really dont want to start something that i later not able to finish because of time constraints.

 

@ALL
For now i have following requirements and if current implementation of DOTS solves it; then im ready to go,
So please suggest which is possible or not.

- instantiating sprites and manipulating their "transform" (scale, rotation, position) for 10k sprites every frame just like this bullet.
- writing algorithm to loop to do complex calculations on those 10k objects (job system)
- coloring those sprites differently every frame

Is this currently possible? To me after watching that youtube video it "seems" easy but im no expert and dont want to get stuck in future.

 

Check the examples first as well.

 

I'm doing sprites using RenderMesh and a quad for mesh without any problem with 60k+ entities. This way you can read/write Translation, Rotation and NonUniformScale inside jobs.

Also possible and that depends on how complex the algorithm is but for 10k that should be a walk in the park

This is not quiet there yet but Unity is working on having support on per instance properties. Until then you can use a custom renderer system but you can read more about it here.

 

That is exactly my issue with DOTS at the moment. But on the other side: Someone needs to learn it to teach others. I don't know the state of where DOTS is right now. Can we expect it 2019.2/.3? Even later? At the moment it feels for me like 2019.3 could be realistic, but also the lack of documentation really worries me and i feel like we still write lots of boilerplate code just to get the basics up and running. Don't start asking about things like collision systems, i just built my own AABB solution, because DOTS feels like some kind of empty shell. It opens a lot of doors for games we for now just dreamed about, but also keeps those doors shut, because of exactly your points. Who is actually familiar with DOTS, but the developers?

 

What about just using camera facing quads? Wouldn't that look 2D enough?

 

then does sprite renderer to dots convertion will be supported?

 

Most people think 2D is just rendering a bunch of quads on the screen, but in a serious 2D game you need a lot of features to make it work that are not easy to do by yourself: sprite atlases (they change the UVs on the meshes of the sprites after sprites are baked into an atlas), masking, animation, and soon lighting. We tried to replicate some of these but because the SpriteRenderer is closed sourced, we had a really hard time doing it. Our only hope is that if we use the standard Sprite system at some point unity will extend their automatic entity conversion to sprites too and we could use it with minimal changes.