Converting your game to DOTS - Unity at GDC 2019

Watch to learn what's involved in migrating existing game code to the new Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), which comprises the C# Job System, the Entity Component System (ECS), and the Burst Compiler.
Speaker: Mike Geig (Evangelist, Unity Technologies)
Find out more about DOTS: on.unity.com/2G9o0x2

[@vakuzar]

We desperately need more of these DOTS tutorials. too incredible of technology to ignore.

[@olieolieolieolie1249]

yes ...and we desperately need a comprehensive and well made documentation even more!!!

[@Dannner]

The guy presenting is amazing - I love the way he made the tutorial/presentation. Looking forward to implementing Dots

[@MikeGeigTV]

Thanks!

[@Bolt6265]

Yo for real, first thing i've seen that made ecs stuff make sense and not seem like a waste of time.

[@emonikino]

Mike is the best unity tutor imo. He knows what to say and he's very systematic in his explanations. He knows what he's talking, he knows what he's doing, and he can makes things easy to understand. I'll say he's on par with Sebastian. They have the healthy balance of knowledge and articulation.

[@miguelpinto35]

MY first unity techer. It's amazing watching this after learning to make my first plataformer from you years ago! Thanks.. Very much!

[@dibaterman]

Yeah, the presentation was genius.

[@jumpman120]

Data oriented design is really the best things for games programming.

[@mehrankhan7871]

"bug or feature!" :D that cracked me up

[@bisalonggo5212]

yeah also don't forget "aaand I can play this _incredibly_ unfair game" hahahaha "death spiral"

[@pierremercy4312]

Amazing tutorial, i never follow any but this one was very clear, fast and funny to follow.

[@Kevroa]

Very cool. I guess I'm gonna need to learn more about to implement it in my games because it seems promising and can provide a large benefit.

[@Pr3DaToR15]

Woah dude. Incredible performance.

[@dreamlabxr5121]

Can't wait for this to get polished. Making a breach and clear VR game and this will certainly help with destruction and networking for multiplayer!

[@skyhigh286]

I don't really understand and frankly not yet interested in DOTS... But this guys explaining knows how to keep an audience. I don't get bored and keep watching till the end. Great job.. man

[@MikeGeigTV]

Thanks!

[@scottcourtney8581]

He is also a fantastic instructor at live classes. If you ever have a chance to attend one at Unite or a smaller conference, don't miss it.

[@CereEnder]

This is crazy. I love it

[@jacobmakob1]

Can't wait for this to really pick up! This + visual scripting is going to be great fun.

[@jesuslovespee]

visual scripting is like taking someone's virginity. it looks good on paper but in the real world it's just a painful, disappointing mess.

[@jacobmakob1]

@@jesuslovespee Maybe with OOP that's true, but I think it'll be nice to transition to DOD using something visual.

[@jesuslovespee]

@@jacobmakob1 that's a very good point. in theend it's just gonna come down to how verbose your're allowed to be w/ visual counterparts. node editing is fun,but rarley efficient. i'd love to see that change.

[@jesuslovespee]

@@jacobmakob1 good point. I'd like to see a visual node editor that's verbose and allows you to quickly switch between script and visual graph

[@tristanriggi3862]

MORE OF THIS DUDE COMMENTARY

[@cristiansmochina9056]

Awesome and all. You just left out the most important part of the whole process. How to convert a classic prefab into a ECS prefab. A link to your project would have been helpfull also.

[@nove1398]

Job components are really interesting

[@mahee1931]

Very informative and funny. Thank you.

[@kevin._.27]

Very helpful. Thank you.

[@autorotate1803]

Good to see Mike also plays minecraft :)

[@msmeraglia]

God Bless You, Mike Acton.

[@EugeneS88-RU]

ECS+Jobs=Power

[@masterneme]

I'd have loved to see hundreds of enemies (maybe thousands?) too.

[@user-bi2jw8cb4z]

Will you provide us a git hub repository with this project? It would greatly help. Thank you.

[@CaptainJeoy]

It's been a long time, Mike Geig

[@MikeGeigTV]

Too long

[@andrewzuo86]

"I know what you're all saying. You would pool that." Exactly what I was thinking!

[@MikeGeigTV]

"MIND TAKER, WOOOEEEEOOOO"

[@SlayPlenty]

So this is primarily focused around calculating quantity? What about.animated foliage effects like smoke and fog?

[@UltimatePerfection]

Why use PowerPoint wgen you can do your presentation directly in Unity with the help of Cinemachine?

[@Aralmo640]

So basically DOTS is isolating the parts of an entity that can be multithreaded while leaving components on the main thread? That's nice, would it be possible to use path-finding planes and alter physics from the job components or that would still run on the main thread?

[@BaluTM]

great talk.. it would be more helpful if you can provide source code to understand the whole setup.. Also more DOTS getting started videos..

[@giantswing3175]

I have like a technical gap I guess with this stuff and I've been watching tutorials of this for a while, is DOTS and ECS the same? I see the two of them getting used interchangeably sometimes, also, once you set up this system for spawning bullets for example, do you still need "object pooling" (does it even make sense to call it object pooling when they are entities?) also if any of you guys know of a good place to really get started with this I'd really appreciate it. As always thanks to the unity team and the community for the awesome work cheers!

[@puretrack06]

DOTS collectively refers to ECS, Job System, and Burst Compiler

[@ArturoNereu]

@@puretrack06 you are correct. Also, just for reference, DOTS stands for Data Oriented Tech Stack.

[@Sodomantis]

All programmers systems starts with "Hey, "

[@LittleRainGames]

World

[@cristiansmochina9056]

@@LittleRainGames Except for multithreaded systems that output 'Hello wrldo' and crash

[@TheSlimshader]

Can we get this project?

[@dandradecov]

Is the source for this available? I know there's a ton of samples, but this one would actually be simple to follow to see the stuff that's not touched during the presentation...

[@Held0fTheWelt]

How do i get the EntityManager in the current preview ??

[@Yamyatos]

I dont have "Jobs" at the top in unity and cant write [BurstCompile]. Kinda confused. Using version 2019.1.0f2. Any ideas? Edit: As always you find your answer 5 minutes after asking for help, even when you searched for quite some time before. You need to install it in the unity package manager, since it's as of now only a preview and not installed by default. This goes for Burst, Entities, Mathematics, ..

[@radbuster4403]

anyone know if the enemy tag component was put on the enemy prefab? i'm assuming that enemy tag script component he showed at the end was added to the enemy prefab, also do all jobs just automatically work without having to attach it to a gameobject? or is it because he put the [BurstCompile] attribute in there?

[@satellite964]

I thought using DOTS would make stuff hard to understand, but it neatly organizes behavior!

[@scottcourtney8581]

I've found it helpful to think of ECS as a sort of non-SQL database, similar to the way LINQ works in C# data structures.

[@satellite964]

@@scottcourtney8581 Don't know LINQ I'm afraid.

[@IElial]

So usually you spawn GameObjects "bullet" from a Prefab. With DOTS, what are the equivalent for the bullet Entities in inspector ?

[@MikeGeigTV]

@@bezoro2008 For now yes. Eventually we will see them in the editor like normal

[@Ziplock9000]

The recent (ish) videos from Unity on ECS & JOB system programming are quite out of date, are there any plans to keep them and DOTS videos and tutorials updated or at the very least delete videos that are teching something that is no longer relevant?

[@WelshGuitarDude]

Unity has become a real mess with documentation and explaining how to learn their new stuff to be honest

[@Ziplock9000]

@@WelshGuitarDude Yup. Later in this video he explains this brand new video actually uses older API syntax than from an older video too.. As well as the ones I already mentioned. What a mess.

[@UnavailableNamesAhh]

It's all WIP. Documentation will become complete when all the ECS stuff is officially released. If you want to work with it you have to go into the forums and ask around after going over the samples Unity has on github.

[@LeoHsieh]

They just keep changing the API and coding style of ECS, I don't think the current version will be a stable version. 99.99%ECS Tutorial 1 year ago are outdated :(

[@Weaver_Games]

Yeah Unity has a propensity to release stuff early. It's both good and bad: I like that I can play with the technology but I'm too afraid to put it in a long term project as it will keep changing and upgrading the project gets harder and harder. I also wish more stuff would go out of beta. HWRP and LWRP are still beta. That tiny project thing is still beta. Auto LOD is still beta, etc.

[@diptarkadas5193]

Glad I saw your comment. I was watching this, and was thinking "Wait, that's not what I remember", and was going to revisit those tutorials.

[@serj_1264]

@@Weaver_Games is AutoLOD free now??

[@CariagaXIII]

@@Weaver_Games the last guy said unity keeps delaying new features. LOL

[@scottcourtney8581]

@@Weaver_Games You have to approach the previews with caution, of course, but I like the fact that the preview releases allow the developer community to have more input into the final design. Isolate the experimental features through careful functional partitioning so only a small part of the project needs to change to adapt to API updates. Scalpel, not shotgun.

[@lemurza5236]

Any chance of us getting the code for this?

[@spe.z.artist]

What is the entity manager? I’m trying to use this but I don’t have a entity manager to reference Nvm* EntityManager manager;

[@michaelharvey1355]

Great demo, can I get the GitHub for the script?

[@ssfnathotmail]

mg, the sam dieter of unity.

[@MikeGeigTV]

Not sure who Sam Dieter is... is this a good thing?

[@ssfnathotmail]

@@MikeGeigTV it is. he's an Unreal guy

[@Democracyphobia]

anyone knows if mike has any online courses . he is the kind of guys i need to learn from .

[@Mehrdad995GTa]

so no more of writing pooling systems, that's great 👍

[@789blablajaja]

I know you are joking, but you could really ditch it sometimes now. ECS combined with the incremental garbace collector- which works great by now - really lets you do a lot of things before instantiation and garbage collection becomes a problem. And before I try to pool prefabs that have to detach parts of itself while beeing active - and other messy stuff - I might just not do it if performance isnt an issue and Im not developing for mobile.

[@lizkimber]

Ijust wish ecs collisions were covered

[@Ryujin_IO]

Any chance we can get the project or source?

[@puretrack06]

Will there be any additional benefit from combining an object pooling system with the dots implementation shown?

[@adribier]

I was wondering the same

[@MikeGeigTV]

Yes, though the impact of generating entities is minimal. So while it would be more efficient, it will be significantly less so as it is already very optimized.

[@MasterofTights]

Why do you have deltatime in the turntowardsplayer job? It's a dumb question, but this bit confused me.

[@KimboKG14]

uhm actually I have created a small game purely on ECS/jobs so now I will upgrade it with everything else that dots offers.

[@apubetico]

tell risk of rain 2 devs this should be the goal!!!!

[@RalphBarbagallo]

So what I don't get is how do these DOTS entities collide with the GameObject if they aren't GameObjects themselves? Where's the collider?

[@onesketchyguy6050]

Ah! Light theme! My eyes!

[@igorthelight]

Agree!

[@knyazvseyarusi9668]

Vampire!

[@kalucky0]

It's easier to read on smaller screen 😉

[@danielernst6816]

What kind of dark magic is this!!

[@cardgamesstall6117]

hi, can i get this project file to study?

[@KimmyAlmighty]

YAY

[@sandichhuu]

Wow. That WTF FPS :o

[@Weaver_Games]

Are the enemies on nav meshes or do they just go in a straight line towards the player?

[@JohnyFirst]

They are just moved with their positions. No navigation involved.

[@MikeGeigTV]

They face the player and then move forward

[@cosmotect]

I want to talk to code like this guy does

[@MikeGeigTV]

Talking to code is easy. Getting the code to talk back, that's a whole other thing...

[@cosmotect]

@@MikeGeigTV hahah, well said!

[@jonathanperreault4503]

im trying to figure out which packages and library i need to be able to use the Entity type in my code , as it is my packages are up to date and we never see the first lines of his code in the script where he creates Entity type variables

[@MikeGeigTV]

You need the Entities package from the package manager. The entity generation stuff was done in the video. Entity entity = EntityManager.Instantiate(...);

[@RedRocksies]

@@MikeGeigTV Entity entity = EntityManager.Instantiate(...); throws "cannot convert from 'unity.entities.prefab' to 'unity.entities.entity' ? what am I missing?

[@MikeGeigTV]

@@RedRocksies The latest version changed the syntax a bit. I am working to get an updated version.

[@icecrystals2855]

Can I get the project to look around?

[@MagicMiikka]

Want that too! :)

[@callmedeno]

wait, so the ECS was only controlling the act of spawning the bullets, the normal gamecode updated them after that?

[@vklymenko]

I believe that the thing is in memory manage. Sure, its possible to do same by taking all objects like FindByComponent and update them, but ECS doing it in some "sorted" way, already having all components sorted in memory and ready to use instead search any and make a list

[@phobos2077_]

How do collisions work with DOTS?

[@TheAndrejP]

You still have to roll your own, as far as I'm aware.

[@EmanX140]

They announced Unity physics and Havok. Unity physics is available in the preview version. You can try it.

[@MikeGeigTV]

New DOTS capable physics was released at GDC. It is awesome, check it out!

[@TheAndrejP]

@@MikeGeigTV ohhh, that's awesome! But I thought it wouldn't be released before the summer?

[@MikeGeigTV]

@@TheAndrejP Oh... whoops. You're right! Here I go getting my timelines mixed up. Sorry about that. What I meant to say was "New DOTS capable physics was NOT released at GDC. It WILL BE awesome, check it out, EVENTUALLY!"

[@olieolieolieolie1249]

While the performance of these new features is awesome I have a serious gripe with it: From my point the machine should adapt to my thinking and not the other way around. Stick with me for a turn to make my point: In the 70’s to mid 80’s we programmed Assembly, Pascal, Basic, Cobol… all procedural languages or (APL etc for functional programming) leading to too much time being used to code and debug. So to get more reliable code faster there was a move in the 80’s towards more powerful syntax constructs so we turned from procedural to 4th Generation languages like SQL, Natural, SAS etc. The point was to just tell the machine what I want and let it figure out the optimal way to do it… That worked very well speeding up database programming by factors of 20 or more. Then came the GUI and along with it the daunting task of managing many objects on screen. In the beginning most code for this was extremely buggy as it was too much for plot programmers to handle using procedural languages. The solution was to get a more abstract view in ways of object oriented programming. This helped the programmer with a more natural view of things and letting the machine do the handling of object communication in the background. Unity followed the approach by having objects and components. With the DOTS approach we are being thrown back to assembly level thinking. All this talk about “simple” and “straight forward” is not so as I am forced to understand all kinds of inner workings and contexts that I feel I should no be bothered with. It is not “simple” just because I don’t have to type much (which I don’t :-/ ) There is no obvious and intuitive red thread to all that syntax gibberish Unity has come up with to formulate these things. So here is Mike Geig showing me a truly generic way of turning towards something. In fact it is so generic and general that it covers everything (much more than I intended). And as a workaround I have to install yet another unintuitive measure - a dummy - to regain control. What a great concept… Why don’t you hide this stuff behind a component that I can just use instead of forcing EVERYONE to do that same coding over and over again. I feel the engine and compiler should this kind of optimisation behind the scenes… with as minimal control input from me as possible. Unity is breaking the OO paradigm to make me think for the engine instead of the other way around. (If I want that I might as well go back to assembly again…or C or any other procedural language…) This coupled with the insufficient documentation that I have seen from Unity in the past does not forebode well for fast, stable development. The learning curve is getting all the more flat… :-(

[@gohelboy]

Does this performent on mobile ?

[@notyetdecided5811]

Good, much easier for hackers like me to find memory location. Thanks.

[@CariagaXIII]

use dots when quantity is in mind.

[@ArturoNereu]

That's one thing. But there are many other scenarios for DOTS. For example, running a mobile game at 30 fps on non-DOTS, battery lasting 1 hour. On DOTS, battery lasting 4. Just theoretical examples, but you can get the point :)

[@themerpheus]

I wonder, in TurnTowardsPlayer script, you pass dt into job struct, but you never use it Mike?

[@MikeGeigTV]

Hah, ya good point. I suppose I didn't need it afterall.

[@Angry-Lynx]

Their ECS implementation is great, but threading is other subject. I really hate the idea of spawning jobs from main thread and then having to sync them. Async programming is so much more beautiful concept, especially for games, where most of stuff happens in loops.

[@LittleRainGames]

You can always write your own multi threaded code.

[@scottcourtney8581]

Over time, I would expect there to be fewer explicit loops (especially polling or update loops) and more event-driven code, even if the loops still exist within the engine. The Linux kernel developers learned (partly through Linux being ported to IBM mainframes) that loops and close links to hardware interrupts and timers are performance killers when you massively scale up. (Do a web search for "Linux" and "jiffie" for some background reading.)

[@thecrazy8888]

This is very cool BUT now there are two completely different things named "Tags" in the engine. Are you willingly trying to make it confusing?

[@DavidGispert]

my eyes got burned when you entered vs

[@VladyVeselinov]

holy shit

[@TedThomasTT]

Is there really no way to see entities in the hierarchy? Don't like the sound of that even if the performance difference is incredible.

[@MrCorrectify]

There is a separate entity viewer window that will show you a list of various entities in the game and their data. As DOTS becomes more standard, I assume there will be more GUI devoted to it.

[@TedThomasTT]

@@MrCorrectify thanks

[@ArturoNereu]

Not as of today, but if you check the Megacity project, you can see an implementation that goes from GameObjects to Entities so you can see, modify, etc. GO's in the Hierarchy, and then using them as Entities at runtime.

[@murrayKorir]

please put code in github its hard trying to implement this in our own projects when you have no idea how he started creating the archetypes

[@FranciscoTChavez]

I'm nine minutes into the video and I'm a bit surprised that he left the call for the position inside an in-bedded for-loop. That's a value that gets calculated on every single call, so calling it multiple times in a single frame is frowned upon when writing performance code. I get that this is a demo for DOTs, and I'm impressed that this slower method was running so many times inside the initialization code, but having this inside the for-loop will create a limit for the DOTs initialization as he scales up the array size. That being said, his player object is at the top of the scene hierarchy so it shouldn't be too much of an issue in this case, but if you switch the spawn point into the position of a child object, then it could turn into an issue that's easy to avoid.

[@DanyloSyrotynskyy]

can we get the source code?

[@antonivanov5536]

where subtitres?

[@lupinedreamexpress]

Let me be the first person to comment "..." You're welcome, ellipsis fans. Dots.

[@toxi6542]

You made me laugh gj

[@nullified__]

wow people are early...

[@hoseinabdl3263]

dude..if instantiating entity is outdated...why do you use it...

[@gamedoughhh]

and this is the end of monobehavior.

[@mygames545]

Can anyone explain me what is DOTs

[@scottcourtney8581]

Data Oriented Technology Stack (the final "S" is also part of the acronym, not pluralizing DOT). :)

[@conscarcdr]

Much data, very sarcasm, wow

[@jso19801980]

i understood n/a

[@AustinPinheiro_uniquetexthere]

where can i get that background ambiance sounds? (joke)

[@oren2234]

maybe dont spawn bullets on the go and use a pool of bullets ?

[@ez4novi]

Oop < Dots

[@Hamstermoviespro]

Please post the sample code of this project to GitHub! It would be greatly appreciated :)

[@arm866]

You should really have a "flashing lights" warning before 16:37. That can't be good for some people to look at.

[@Clystron426]

I'm sure epileptics have learned to quickly look away when they spot something flashing.

[@KickBackStudio]

This is a criticism more about the title than the actual video, but: You say "Converting your game to DOTS" so I was hoping to see a real world, mundane example and seeing if there are any benefits there. Instead I learnt that DOTS is really useful in a totally implausible scenario, if I'm also following the worst practices ever. Thanks, I guess?

[@yaminnather521]

The second comment XD

[@KevinHarper3DArtist]

Not a big fan of tutorials that have so many pre baked steps

[@DreadKyller]

The point of this presentation wasn't to be a tutorial, it was a demo, and introduction to some concepts, they have limited times in these conferences and can't spend too long writing up the demos they're going to showcase.

[@stevenixx3595]

it looks messy, shame

[@yesdude153]

More complicated programming = more losing of beginners. A bad policy.

[@ThefamousMrcroissant]

Documentation still ass, experimental packages still hidden, updating old packages requires a manual partial rewrite. Support absolute Unity tier garbage as expected.