Is tiny meant to eventually become the default Unity mode?

Since Unity is moving towards pure ECS it makes sense that there is a separate mode now that is pure ECS, also one could assume that when more and more features are migrated to ECS this will become the preferred way to work in Unity and thus the default Unity. Is this the intention for Tiny long-term?

 

No. It's an optional way of working.

 

Of course, it's optional, but in 5-10 years from now, if this could become the vastly preferred way of working, the question of dropping the currently standard way would become relevant.

 

No, because Tiny is made in C# and there is no point in Unity making Unity not work with C#, or rather the code you will be doing in Tiny will be C#

 

You might have misunderstood me. Tiny will be C#, Unity will be ECS, so at some point, they will merge, that's what I expect. And at the end, Unity will look more like Tiny than current Unity. (All features will migrate to ECS. Non-ECS will be deprecated)

 

I think the answer is "who knows".

If in 10 years, Tiny is still around and it makes sense (somehow) for it to become default, it might.

 

I think they will merge long before that. There will be no reason for them to be separate. Just wondering if this is part of the vision of Unity team. Tiny lets them test the new tooling that is no doubt will be used with Unity.Entities.

This was the vision of the future of Unity: modular, pure ECS based.

 

Absolutely. Instead of pure engine stripping you'll be able to pick and chose engine components to use/export.
Joachim Ante has said as much. Also, the simpler approach of ECS in Tiny VS the current full blown version.

I think Tiny is a test bed for near future workflows, 2-3 years. You can already see it with package manager and Scriptable Render Pipelines, you can pick and chose the parts of the engine you want to use.

 

No, because Tiny is aimed at small things compiled to WebASM for viewing in a browser (or browser-based framework), and Unity in general is aimed at big things compiled to native code.

They're two very different beasts, and the more you merge them, the less efficient they are. All of Unity's big pushes at the moment are to improve efficiency and generate performant code.

 

ECS-only mode in Unity is bound to happen and become the main mode. Makes sense if tiny will grow into that, while the current Unity will adopt its features (while having to also support a lot of the old code base and systems). Tinly just doesn't have those limitations, and it also doesn't have limitations on what it might be able to do. But yes, "merge" might not be the way it would go.

Anyway, just speculations. Very curious little thing Tiny is. I still can't even figure out if its multithreaded under the hood (I think it isn't).