Unity Tiny Still Alive?

Hey Unity Team,

Will Unity Time get a stable release in future?

Is there any roadmap for Unity Tiny?

 

The project has not been updated for 1 year.

 

Happy Unity Tiny Limbo Party to all Tiny users!

*insert confetti here*

The only information we have on DOTS (and therefore Unity Tiny by extension) is located in this thread.
I recommend asking questions there as you'll have the best chance at getting an answer.

As for a quick answer — there doesn't seem to be any roadmap for Tiny. My best guess is that Unity Tiny will get revived when Entities hits 1.0. But that is pure speculation on my part. Hopefully Unity will say something about this when they release more information on the future of DOTS as a whole.

We'll see.

 

Tiny assumes a 100% ECS ecosystem and the update on DOTS says there is never going to be a 100% ECS/DOTS coverage of all systems in the engine.

Hopefully they will migrate what they have learned from Tiny into WebGL to improve it.

RIP Tiny.

 

Yep, this is what I think their plan is. Much to my surprise, they've recently decided to make mobile support for WebGL a priority — which was pretty much the whole point of Tiny in the first place. Since presumably all that work adding mobile support for WebGL would be throwaway if Tiny ships for real, I have to believe that Unity thinks Tiny is either never happening or not happening any time soon.

 

But why waste all that effort on adding more support for WebGL when it is being superseded by WebGPU? (WebGPU is likely to be fully supported by major browsers by June 2022?). Methinks this vaporware may just continue to rise forever

 

That seems like a pretty optimistic timeline. And being available != reaching mass deployment. I agree with you of course that WebGPU is the future, but I think Unity is betting it will be well into 2023 before you can ship webGPU targeting code and expect it to "just work" on most folks' devices across desktop and mobile.

 

Looks like Unity has a job opening for WebGPU work, so if you or anyone else wants to help them along...

https://careers.unity.com/position/software-developer-unity-webgl/3514831?gh_src=1

 

Tiny is obviously not continued
1) No Unity team member replies to any post of any kind whatsoever, since months
2) DOTS 0.5 was announced but the questions on Tiny (including in the thread of this announcement) remain ALL unanswered
The good news are that DOTS 0.5 will still allow manual builds and, without reaching the tiny size of this project, we shall still be able to pick our packages, thus to create a custom tiny / indeed, but for basic games with little arts & sounds (heavy), the difference in size will only be significant for people aiming at instant games (for Meta/Facebook, etc). Otherwise, even for the web (I believe that the web platform will be provided), we should be able to somehow continue to build job/burst/ECS game with a moderate footprint.
My only regret will be to have been left with you all in the dark like that: inelegant, inappropriate even.
Thanks to GilCat https://forum.unity.com/members/gilcat.413054/ for being, still, really active on this forum !

 

I bet they have been put Tiny on hold because they might have made some change in DOTS

DOTS is the core of Tiny and if that was unstable, so did Tiny, so they can't answer anything now

In the end Tiny might be merged into a feature of DOTS

But I am quite sure the concept that they want smaller build to allow instant game and ads or small interactive presentation built from unity will not be gone

 

Maybe not easy to use, but not unstable. Our game is built with DOTS, mostly hybrid stuff, and works across PC, Mac, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X and Switch. If anything, it is the most stable package Unity has ever built.

 

Unstable is not meant unusable. I am not say it would broken down in used or something like that. I mean it might have been completely changed in future version

 

Even Switch, wow. All of that is great news, definitely. I would not say that Tiny is unstable, but yes definitely hard to use, AND limited, but preliminary tests on web are VERY promising.

 

I think that Unity Tiny is not dead. However, I think that we should not have any updates soon. I find it quite challenging due to the lack of implemented features at the moment.

However, I see that as a learning progress because it allows me to build my own systems and to learn more about the fundamentals behind everything feature that I take for granted. Love it!

 

According to Laurent Gibert himself, "Development of lightweight DOTS Runtimes such as Project Tiny has been paused, driven by the pivot for DOTS to incremental delivery. This allowed us to focus and accelerate enabling our core user base to build more ambitious games with the existing engine. We will need to come back to lightweight DOTS runtimes in the future as part of our longer-term strategy and we have research activities in this direction, but a concrete plan for this does not exist yet."
https://portal.productboard.com/wkjyyxmtns7dipwofp19pj8r/c/1164-dots-runtime
SO Tiny is not dead, but not a priority, not yet included in the long-term strategry (?) and not even with existing plans.

 

More info, self explanatory...
https://forum.unity.com/threads/dots-and-2d-resurrection-of-tiny.1371474/#post-8645217

 

Did it at least get the C# support that they talked about doing?