Templates, snippets and Extensions for ECS

Unity ECS is great, but it's too verbose. I constantly find myself typing really similar patches of code here or there.

I made almost 50 resharper templates for Unity over the years, a few surrounding templates too. And homemade tiny library with bunch of syntactic sugarish extensions methods to speed up my workflow.

I wander if you guys have any thoughts on how to speed up / make easier to write ECS code with such tools?

 

I only have a Create/ECS System context menu item for generating the basic boilerplate you want in pretty much all ComponentSystems:

Spoiler

Code (CSharp):

1. #if UNITY_EDITOR
2. using System.IO;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using UnityEditor;
5.  
6. public static class ECSGenerateSystem
7. {
8.     static string _template =
9.     "using Unity.Entities;\n" +
10.     "\n" +
11.     "class ##SystemName## : ComponentSystem\n" +
12.     "{\n" +
13.     "    struct Data\n" +
14.     "    {\n" +
15.     "        public int Length;\n" +
16.     "    }\n" +
17.     "    [Inject] Data _data;\n" +
18.     "    \n" +
19.     "    protected override void OnUpdate()\n" +
20.     "    {\n" +
21.     "        for (int i = 0; i < _data.Length; i++)\n" +
22.     "        {\n" +
23.     "        }\n" +
24.     "    }\n" +
25.     "}\n";
26.  
27.     class DoCreateSystem : UnityEditor.ProjectWindowCallback.EndNameEditAction
28.     {
29.         public override void Action(int instanceId, string pathName, string resourceFile)
30.         {
31.             string baseFile = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(pathName);
32.             string fullPath = Path.GetFullPath(pathName);
33.  
34.             var text = _template.Replace("##SystemName##", baseFile);
35.             File.WriteAllText(fullPath, text);
36.  
37.             AssetDatabase.ImportAsset(pathName);
38.             ProjectWindowUtil.ShowCreatedAsset(
39.                 AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(pathName, typeof(Object)));
40.         }
41.     }
42.  
43.     [MenuItem("Assets/Create/ECS System", false, 0)]
44.     public static void Create()
45.     {
46.         ProjectWindowUtil.StartNameEditingIfProjectWindowExists(
47.             0,
48.             ScriptableObject.CreateInstance<DoCreateSystem>(),
49.             "NewSystem.cs",
50.             EditorGUIUtility.IconContent("cs Script Icon").image as Texture2D,
51.             "");
52.     }
53. }
54.  
55. #endif

I've been toying with some extension methods on ComponentSystem to e.g. skip writing PostUpdateCommands all the time, but I'm not sure it's worth it. To be honest, while getting used to it I don't think ECS is _that_ much more verbose in comparison to my usual style.

 

There have been a few threads on this topic already with a few snippets posted.
The ECS is still kind of in an early stage and I think these things will come over time.
For me it's currently more important that the actual core functionality is there.