We are renaming and moving the DOTS forums into a dedicated ECS for Unity category on the main page of the forum. The Data Oriented Technology Stack forum will be renamed to Entity Component System, and the subforums for Physics, Netcode, and Graphics will be moved alongside it. The DOTS Animation forum will remain in the Betas & Experimental Features section for the time being. The reason behind the naming changes is to provide more clarity around the ECS and DOTS terminology.
DOTS is the umbrella term for Data-oriented Technologies in Unity, which includes ECS for Unity, the C# Job System, and the Burst compiler. ECS for Unity specifically refers to the suite of ECS-compatible packages developed to be used with projects containing elements of ECS. We hope that creating this distinction will help creators navigate to the right forum sections and engage with their community members more easily.
Lastly, we are creating a dedicated forum to discuss the C# Job System under the Scripting forums alongside the Burst subforum.
With ECS for Unity becoming fully supported starting with Unity 2022.2 Tech Stream, we are looking forward to seeing what you will be able to create!
Uh, so where do you fit SystemBase, or ISystem and its jobs?
Or other combinations.
This is not just ECS, or jobs, or burst, They can live in them separately and in conjunction with each other.
Systems can run without jobs, or without ECS.
I think changing DOTS to ECS brings more confusion that proposal. It makes no sense to me.
I see more mess across various topics and decoupling, than it think it may solve.
Now we may end up in that IJobForeach will be asked in jobs Forum and IJobEntitites/ IJobChunk in ECS forum.
I see complete mess coming to town.
This is completely wrong
What DOTS Dev Blitz Day 2022 does in ECS in this case.
See, you already introduce mess, not knowing the own structure.
DOTS Graphics is not mandatory to use ECS. It is possible to disable hybrid rendering and render without ECS, while still supporting jobs and burst.
We had good example of such use cases.
I, for one, like this change in forum structure because the ECS workflow is significantly different from just using Jobs. The types of jobs you use in ECS are also different.
I’m not against a réorganisation of the forum but…
Planing that at the same time as the dev blitz day on DOTS was a mistake.
I’ve been navigating this forum for year now and now I’m lost. I can’t even navigate to the sub forums since they don’t show at the top of the parent forum anymore…
These change were obviously planned ahead since the post is from mid November, even if it wasn’t visible until now.
It was kinda nice having the “Unity for the new era of nerds” under one umbrella category “DOTS” and the packages using DOTS technology under that. I felt safe and cozy.
The rename is definitely weird for me. This forum is the one stop shop for all things DOTS. I reserve one tab for it when I open the browser so I know all about DOTS updates and answers. Now, I have to look for other threads, too? Can we no longer ask about jobs and Burst here? I’m just used to it. This forum is like my home.
This seems counter intuitive with the “DOTS is the stack. ECS is a part of it.” idea. Why not have a DOTS section with:
Burst
C# Jobs
Collections (and could you please move blob assets into this)
ECS Core
ECS Animation
ECS Netcode
etc…
This change feels pretty weird and feels like a step away from the idea of the DOTS as a stack. Also, in a more practical point, it’s not great that I can’t look in a single place for all things DOTS and instead have to move around the forum to get a complete picture of what is happening in this environment.
I’m all for reorganizing things every now and again, but it should really make things easier to find and understand — not spread information all over the place.
Jobs, Burst, and ECS are very intertwined. When you’re using ECS, there’s very little point to not use jobs and Burst (at least in 0.51). So what is this forum for? Strictly only for ECS?
The unfortunate bit is that the tagline for the old DOTS subforum was “Discuss all matters related to DOTS, including the Entity Component System (ECS), the C# Job System, and the Burst compiler.” which overlaps with the Burst subforum (“Discuss anything related to the Burst compiler.”) and the jobs subforum (“Discuss Unity’s C# Job System for use with GameObjects and Entities.”).
I don’t really like the top-level “ECS for Unity” name especially with the fact that the Entity Component System subforum still reads “DOTS forum to discuss ECS, C# Job System and more.” - eh? That tastes like reversing the hierarchy. From rauiz’s suggestion, it would be great to just nest the existing jobs and Burst Scripting subforums under this one and title this DOTS again. That, or just give up on DOTS branding in the forum altogether and leave Entities-specific Burst / jobs talk in this subforum (but explicitly specify everything is in the context of ECS) and preserve the Scripting subforums as-is.
Job system and burst are directly related to scripting, so it makes sense to have them as subforums of scripting, whereas ECS is more than just scripting. However, there are a lot of overlaps with other forums here, so it is actually quite difficult to make a classification that everyone is satisfied with.
E.g. Would it also make sense to move “Physics for ECS” to the Physics forum, but that would distribute all ECS related forums throughout the forum.
The practical question is “what information is most likely to be useful for someone in this forum subsection?” That is the practical way of organizing information (likelyhood of usage and utility). Physics for ECS info is much more useful in cases where people are building in the DOTS environment. It is also much more likely that other DOTS posts are useful for someone that is just using Physics for ECS and it’s APIs (maybe there’s a Collections question that is useful or a burst one, etc…). Forum section discoverability, however, is quickly solved by google and forum search features.
DOTS is marketed as a technology stack that contains Burst/Jobs/ECS/Collections. So you can also say Burst/Jobs are directly related to DOTS. Btw, I don’t think you can just use Burst/Jobs without thinking about data in a non-OOP way. Not to its fullest potential at least.
Semantically separating information is always better than separating based on names. Just because they are named Physics, doesn’t mean their information is relevant within the same context and semantics. IMHO, that’s an easy trap to fall into (and, rather interestingly, very common in OOP code bases too hahahaha)
This is all to say… IMO, just keep DOTS stuff together as the most common time where that information is useful is when working with some combination of the technologies inside the stack.
since this thread is about the forum changes and since I have some brain damage with such sorts of things let me ask you @UnityJuju :
From where comes the need to add the “for Unity” suffix to the “ECS”? This is the only subforum dedicated “for Unity” so that means that for example “Input System” isn’t?
I know that this sounds absurd and not critical, sorry about that
Same argument would be valid for Multiplier forum.
Why not to put Unity Multiplier, or Multiplier Services. Shouldn’t it be Unity Multiplier Services instead?
There is ongoing inconsistency with naming convention across whole board of Unity, from the forum to C# API.
And if anything, ECS or Unity ECS brings confusion already. Specially still having DOTS Blitz thread hanging there.
Naming DOTS instead and putting right sub forum there, would clear all tihis debate about changes.
Now there is DOTS and ECS. O hold on. There is no DOTS anymore. There is Unity ECS, scripting jobs, and scripting burst. But hey, burst is not just some exclusive API to Unity.
So what is DOTS anymore?
