Question To Bake or Not To Bake

That is the question!

I find that creating a subscene and making authoring scripts is cumbersome and breaks the layout of the scene I'm trying to make.

Instead I've chosen to create a regular scene and simply add Entities and Components directly when needed.
So when, say, a new object spawns in the scene, I manually create entities from the EntityManager and add the required components it may need.

I feel like there is an inherent cost to doing this rather than baking, but I would love some feedback from someone that may know better.

Is there a significant disadvantage to manually handling entities and components rather than baking them?

 

you are simply doing your "baking" at runtime via the entitymanager vs using bakers in edit time. the disadvantage is you pay the cost in delaying starting the game and baked subscenes allow for streaming entities in and out very quickly which wont be possible for in your case. the further you go with this, the more wheel reinventing you will be doing as you are ignoring the builtin baking systems and functionality that unity is spending significant time developing.

 

Thanks for the insight!
I'll put some more time into fiddling with baking, then!

 

Baking is not flexible, it's best to have entity prefabs that can be loaded when needed, instead of throwing everything into the scene from the beginning.

 

You can bake prefabs.

 

Yes, bake them all at the very beginning.

 

You're loosing loading performance.
But, as subscenes aren't the most stable thing in the world - you're winning iteration time.

Other than doing authoring manually not really. There's a bit of overhead due to wrappers, but simulation speed wise should be identical. Systems such as new Transform system, rendering etc can also be used if you know what they need in order to run.

For hybrid approach, check out EntitiesExt, might find there a bunch of ideas how to make runtime authoring as fast as possible without subscenes.