Unity ECS Wiki

Over the years the Unify community (Unity wiki) has become quite outdated and neglected. This is likely due to the fact the forums and answers sites serve similar purposes and seem to be the preferred go to options. However, I still think the wiki fills an important role when it comes to organizing lots of of useful information. So I've been working on updating and improving it over the last few months to hopefully help breath some new life into it.

Recently as I've been studying the new ECS I've also come to the realization that the wiki is probably the perfect place to organize all this rapidly evolving ECS knowledge. Searching through the forums for specific ECS information right now is less than optimal and the official documentation is currently incomplete and can quickly become obsolete due to the rapid rate of development. So it seems like the wiki would be the perfect place to create a centralized, up to date, knowledge base for this kind of information.

To get this started I've gone ahead and created a new Entity Component System page on the wiki with some basic information. I'll continue to do what I can to build upon this, but I would be more than happy if other members of the community would join me in building it. I'm open to any kind of contributions, from simple suggestions here as to what you'd like to see on the wiki, to actually creating new ECS articles and sample scripts on the wiki.

Side Note: If anyone here is a wiki admin with permission to edit the main page and/or sidebar please contact me. I'd like to update the main wiki sidebar links but don't have permission to do so.

 

I think problem with wiki is, search engine results never appoint to it. At least I don't recall it. Maybe because wiki is outdated. Or maybe because search algorithm don't see enough traffic to them, so they are not listed on the top, of search results.

Either way, I think would be nice to have wiki for ECS. However, there is another problem. At least at the current. ECS evolves so much, that work you will put now, no matter how appreciate we will be, soon is likely become outdated. And then we need have active voluntaries, to be willing keep update knowledge base.

So, I think wiki is good, as long knowledge in it don't change, or change at most every few years, to not become outdated, or as said, need very active wiki community, to keep updated.

So far we got multiple resources of knowledge and examples. And many of them are getting old already.

 

Of course, the initiatives are commendable, but at the moment useless ECS is developing very quickly and is in preview, and therefore to get another source of information that is just as quickly becoming obsolete like everything else, this is only more confusing for newbies. When ECS will be released at least in a stable version, then it will be possible to support from release to release, but not now, unfortunately.

 

Actually, the rapid pace of development is exactly why I think the wiki is the perfect place for this. When a wiki page becomes outdated, anyone in the community is free to update it instantly. It also gives the community a centralized point of knowledge to collaborate on. In contrast, forum posts can only be edited by the original author and new information is usually just added in additional posts or threads anyway that can get easily buried. Leading to a huge cluster of outdated content that you have to sift through to find what you're looking for.

I think the component group injection attribute is a perfect example here: It's going to be deprecated, but official samples still use it and the only way to learn about this is to read random forum posts. However, If we had a wiki page on the subject (which I plan to create) we could easily update it to explain that this feature is going to be removed and warn users not to use it. So I actually think the wiki would be of great help to newbies. So they don't, for example, start using soon to be obsolete features, etc.

In any case I kind of like resistance to my ideas. It motivates me to prove people wrong.

 

By all means do it. I will support you mentally, or even maybe with few thoughts.
I really wouldn't mind having collective data on wiki.

How I would imagine, rather than focusing on individual functions, at least at the start, I would like see start from small system examples. Also, with references to our forum, or external links, if applicable.

Not to forget, about adding note to pages, of last updated / compatible Unity version.

By adding references to forum threads, there is higher chance, to find up to date info.

 

I think a Wiki is fine for learning - thanks for the initiative! I don't think enough people will see it but I'm grateful someone tried.

For something as aggressively changing as ECS, it's probably best to just keep working with it and stay with forums, if only because so many people will see the forums at least. Maintaining a wiki is quite labour intensive.

That said, I really am grateful someone is trying.

 

I mean, if wiki will have good content, then we could have pined thread.
I think that is feasible? At least to boost visibility a bit.

 

I would also like to point out that while many aspects of the API will change before version 1.0 there are also a lot of things that will remain the same. Like the fundamental concepts of ECS and goals behind the project. So I will at least try to start there.