Some questions about ECS (I'm very new to it)

I started learning ECS literally yesterday, and I have a couple of questions, good if someone more experienced can answer them.

I understand how to create struct, generate authoring component from it and put it on the GameObject. Is this pure ECS approach or part of hybrid ECS?

Is there a way to create entities in component model without that conversion workflow from inspector? Because I see people just creating entites from code, setting a lot of data and these typeof everywhere. Is this what pure ECS is? Is this supposed to be like that? Or it's just temporary and we will see some inspector entity builder in the future?

 

Don't worry about the difference between "pure" and "hybrid". The distinction isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. "Hybrid" is typically an indication that a UnityEngine.Object is involved.

The conversion workflow is the recommended workflow for authoring entities. While some people like to configure all their entities in code, there's no real advantage to it.

 

The GameObject with your authoring component gets destroyed after the conversion to Entity is done. So at this point you only have your Entity. This means that (as far as this one Entity is concerned) it is pure ECS. Hybrid ECS means that you have both Entities and GameObject MonoBehaviours at work in your scene. But if all your GameObjects get converted to Entities, it is pure ECS.

Also note that pure ECS isn't necessarily "better" in all cases and hybrid ECS isn't bad practice. You have to see for yourself what parts of your game work best in ECS, and what parts are better for GameObjects (especially parts that don't really have a DOTS equivalent yet, like UI).

 

I don’t know what’s with the word hybrid but for some reason it lends itself to suggestions some temp or in transition to it pure form, hybridrender is another one that does this