Harnessing the power of ECS for Unity | Unity at GDC 2023

ECS for Unity 2022 will be fully released alongside Unity 2022 LTS in just a few weeks. Learn from our panel of creators who have already leveraged ECS to great success in their games, and hear about the future for Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS).
Speakers:
Laurent Gibert, Director, Product Management (DOTS and Multiplayer)
Justin Larrabee, CTO and Co-founder, Sunblink Entertainment
Timestamps
0:00 - Introduction
0:58 - What is DOTS?
1:42 - ECS for Unity 2022
5:35 - Introduction: Justin from Sunblink
5:40 - HEROish Introduction
7:19 - Is DOTS all about performance?
12:04 - Reducing production risks with ECS
18:06 - Empowering designers with ECS
26:16 - Rider support for DOTS
27:47 - Try ECS for Unity
#unity #gamedev #ecs

[@JustinSunblink]

Hey all, I'm the speaker and I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to watch my talk!

[@jeffkenz1507]

hi mr Justin can u share more deeper how to achieve animator PlayableGraph

[@onerimeuse]

Yeah, assuming this is really you, I would be so very happy to watch a few hours on the lower level nitty gritties of the topics covered here, if you ever felt you had the time to just sit and talk to a camera that long. 😂 ... Seriously though. But even without that, great talk! Thank you for sharing your experiences with us!

[@LarsSteenhoff]

Thanks and any chance the Playmaker actions will be released?

[@runninggames771]

You still work there?

[@darkfafi]

I think that animation gameplay separation is an extremely valuable tool. It's one of those main problems which I never found a truly clean solution to. It would be great to have as a Unity Asset or built into Unity for sure! Thank you for the presentation! Learned a lot!

[@mrx10001]

Ye especially for root animations, how are you going to ensure the colliders, transforms for every single part of a character is exactly the same place with the rendered version and the pure data version.

[@Shinkaze33]

YAY!!! :-) ECS 1.0 has been a long time coming. Congrats to the team for getting it out and looking forward to the new levels of capability it enables.

[@cnfnbcn3227]

1.0 is just straight out a lie. It is still a preview package, still basically a beta test. Still loads of bugs and stuff. I dunno what their intentions were when calling this update 1.0, but it's not a release.

[@NoahPetrides]

Very excited for ECS. Playing around with some personal projects, still struggling to change my perspective from object-oriented to data-oriented but looking forward to more and more tooling and systems!

[@jackiedaytona1017]

It’s certainly a mind shift and may not be the best solution to what you want. However, it’s been one of my favorite ways to approach programming now, composition is incredibly freeing over inheritance and abstraction.

[@freewebtime]

Think of it like of a database. It's in memory, and it's only data. And you apply external operations to it. And also you render some of it

[@AustinPinheiro_uniquetexthere]

its coming out? cant wait to try the stable versions. hope nothing breaks when i update

[@Lycam]

Unity should really release and maintain flagship games (at least one PC, one mobile), so they can learn and improve their workflow. Unreal is way ahead on this, they had unreal tournament and right now Fortinite, they know exactly how to make games and use that knowledge to build the better engine for this. Their engine was build from the ground from gamedevs. If Unity dont copy this pattern, they will forever release flawed tools. Always deprecating and always in experimental.

[@Tech-is1xy]

They tried to do so with Gigaya, but they ended up scrapping the project.

[@nordbros523]

It's cool. I'll wait for DOTS 1.5

[@kelvinlovegame]

How the animator worked? It's look awesome!

[@containedhurricane]

Please make a comprehensive tutorial about an open-world game with ECS

[@JustinSunblink]

We have another game in development that is open-world with a similarly hybrid approach to using ECS. Sometime late summer or early fall I will most likely be sharing more information about how we pulled it off.

[@containedhurricane]

@@JustinSunblink Thanks!

[@rambii.]

While ECS looks good, it is still missing a lot of stuff for me to make the switch. Especially when it comes to the things we normally use in Unity. And most of the packages don’t support ECS

[@mrx10001]

you don't have to port over everything, hybrid is a thing for a reason, you do it system by system.

[@mmonster2661]

I am struggling to find a good resource to learn dots. I have worked with job system. Please suggest me a good up to date resource for dots.

[@TheMrSnipey]

There isn't one. Not that still works with the current version of ECS. Every tutorial older than 6 months doesn't work any more.

[@adamz8314]

the best talk in GDC2023.

[@akchu]

Gilfoyle is into GameDev now. Sweet!!!

[@Drischdaan]

What theme are they using for rider at 27:05?

[@MarsLaaars]

I want to know as well (commenting just in case if someone knows).

[@diligencehumility6971]

Unity is like Frankenstein's monster. It has an input system, but it's outdated, and you have to import the new input system every time, change settings and restart editor. Unity has a default renderer, but it's outdated, you have to choose between two other non-functional render pipelines.. both of them are missing features the default renderer had. Unity has MonoBehavior, but it's outdated(?), instead you should import ECS and re-write your entire code for a totally different paradigm. Can you make up your mind?

[@Danny-jn6xr]

When Does ECS Support Hot Updates?

[@soyunbonus]

Still using good old gameobjects with built-in RP in 2022 😅

[@siarheipilat8152]

Bro it's 2023, wake up 😂

[@soyunbonus]

@@siarheipilat8152 it's what works best on consoles! 😇

[@HezoYam-ju6ru]

Same bro, urp have performance problem on mid range android

[@MikeCroswell]

Humph. I'll believe it when I can use it and not have to change code on the next version. Unity: Take a note from Microsoft's old COM model. Get the basics down. When you add don't change the old way, but extend it. This way our code doesn't break.

[@evanlane1690]

It's almost like pre-1.0 preview content shouldn't be relied on for production code. If only Unity had told us that over and over in both their talks and all the ECS documentation.

[@MikeCroswell]

@@evanlane1690 Yes, especially since many of their other alternatives are solid. I'm sticking to good old OOPs/Component for most code and using their VFX or compute shaders for cases where I need huge numbers of visual items. I feel ECS/DOTS should be implemented through attribute hints and otherwise be behind the scenes.

[@WelshGuitarDude]

Keeping the old way when the old way is poorly designed is not going to go well in the long run

[@GrayFoxware]

UNity should use a chatgpt model that was fed all the recent coding document updates so we can ask it questions. It would help so i don have to search the internet for learning how to code entities with the most recent info.

[@mayank4156]

DOTS seems hard to learn lol.

[@kratosdisciple4637]

As soon as I hear anyone say they are "passionate" about something that is purely mechanical in nature, I immediately tune out. Either it is effective and stands on its merits. Or it is not. Feelings have nothing to do with it.

[@TedThomasTT]

Cool story bro

[@Kolyasisan]

Tune down the edge, kratos

[@leyren2606]

People have feelings. You can be passionate about something that is effective, you can also be passionate about something that is ineffective in its current state and improve on it, believing in its potential. Nearly no solution, technological or architectural, was effective and well-structured out of the box, but required passionate and interested people to drive them forward. Also, of course there is more than just "effectiveness" to things, even on technical topics. A lot of coding, design and development is either dependent on the specific situation, or even up to style / preference of the creator.

[@andriidrihulias6197]

Terrain doesn't work, animation doesn't work, hybrid render pipeline was removed... Liars

[@irtezamasud1079]

Hybrid render pipeline means?

[@thomasfalcon6350]

@@irtezamasud1079 Hybrid Renderer which was replaced by Entities Graphics Package

[@irtezamasud1079]

@@thomasfalcon6350 Sometimes some changes really the pain in the ass.

[@knightoftheblood1841]

"In ECS for Unity 2022, we decided to go for more consistent naming in some packages. In particular, we found that users were often confusing “com.unity.rendering.hybrid” as an additional rendering pipeline, which was not true. Additionally, the name is more consistent because “com.unity.entities.graphics” contains code to draw what the “com.unity.entities” package produces." Source: Unity Forum The hybrid render pipeline is not removed. Because it's not even a render pipeline. They just gave the wrong name. That's all.

[@siarheipilat8152]

Bro you are just confused😊

[@ahmadjames151]

😐..

[@DarthHawkGaming-dz8dj]

No need to watch this video, ever! Congratulations on destroying your engine Unity. I have a game in production using Unity that was supposed to be released on Steam December 2023. That's not happening now. I'm going to port it over to a different engine and I'm never using Unity again. Goodbye!

[@AbnerDev]

This is a kludge, I found it horrible to program in dots