My name is Laurent Gibert, Director of Product Management in charge of DOTS and Multiplayer for the Unity engine. I wanted to address the concerns some of our users have that the work we have accomplished so far with DOTS could be impacted by recent events at Unity.
I’d like to confirm the same teams are still focused on shipping the final version of ECS, with its netcode, graphics, and physics packages, for Unity 2022 LTS. I would like to highlight the amazing contributions of the people who started DOTS originally years ago, some of them are still in our teams, and some have moved on, but the technology is still alive and well! In fact, we are seeing more and more usage and questions, more demand for training, and more projects exploring the possibilities.
We have seen dozens of games already shipping using ECS for Unity on most platforms Unity engine supports and we are excited at the prospect to see more and more ambitious games made with Unity landing on the market, oftentimes thanks to DOTS!
We’ve invited the team working on DOTS to come say hi in this thread. You’ll recognize some of us who are very active on this forum or on our discord server, and some new faces who are usually more shy. Please don’t hesitate to say hello!
Hi folks. I’m Joe Valenzuela, Director on DOTS. I’ve been running the DOTS engineering team for the last year or so and I wanted to introduce myself.
My background is in the video game industry, where I made games for about 20 years. My first industry job was working at Loki Entertainment, where I helped port Windows games to GNU/Linux. I went from there to Treyarch (mostly before they really made Call of Duty) and then Insomniac (in the PS3 and PS4 era). I’ve been at Unity for about 3½ years.
I’ve always been more of an engine programmer than a gameplay programmer - I love a juicy technical puzzle. I’m also a Data Oriented Design (DOD) true believer. That’s why I jumped at the chance to join the DOTS team at Unity - using the principles of DOD to allow the thousands of people using Unity to create the games of their dreams? It’s very exciting.
The team has been hard at work on our upcoming ECS release for a while now. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it in the hands of all y’all.
Seán from Physics here. I’ve been at unity almost 8 years now and have been leading the physics team for nearly 3 years.
I have 24 years experience in the games industry and before Unity I worked on Formula 1 99-04, Destruction Derby Raw, Lego Island 2, Peter Pan 2 PS2, Stolen, Battlefield, Supercars, Ride to Hell, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, SBK, WRC, Mud, Moto GP, Diggs Nightcrawler, Angry Birds, Crackdown 3.
I love turning math into code that can then provide users with the tech they need to create advanced physics simulations for fun and profit. As a former quantum mechanic, as far as I am concerned the sky is not the limit when it comes to physics programming. DOTS will enable us to push that limit.
Hey Folks! I’m Jonathan Mankin, Quality Manager on DOTS. I’ve been managing the Quality process for DOTS for the past couple of years.
Like most folks on DOTS I got my start working on video games. My first two jobs were at Squaresoft and Blizzard Entertainment. Some of the games I worked on: Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Chrono Cross, Warcraft III, Diablo II, World of Warcaft, Hearthstone and Diablo III.
As Joe said, we are working very hard to get our upcoming ECS packages into your hands. We are super excited when we see what you do with these tools!
I’m Christopher Redden, a Staff Engineer working as part of the technical leadership team in DOTS. I’ve been working in DOTS for over 3 years, and it is a genuinely real passion project for me
I’ve got 15 years experience and come from the UK games industry originally. I won’t list all the games, because it just wouldn’t make me look as cool as some of my colleagues above I originally went into the industry as a junior desperate to be a gameplay programmer, but very quickly fell into working on the tech side. In the end, I found it to be incredibly satisfying to build frameworks and utilities to enable gameplay programmers, designers and artists to express their creative vision. This led me to work on in-house engines, and later here at Unity!
I love to hack at home, and personally use Linux in my day to day (not Arch, btw). I constantly bounce between weird useless stuff like writing emulators nobody will use and a variety of hobby game prototypes I’ll totally one day finish…maybe.
For me, Entities 1.0 is just the start, and I very much look forward to where the we and the community will be going with Entities in the future.
Hi guys, this is actually quite pleasant to see Unity DOTS devs here.
Specially after long silence periods, which indeed have spawned various concerns about future of DOTS.
While I see shipping toward DOTS 1.0 and general progress on DOTS, us devs would like to make sure, that path for the DOTS future is bright and not fogged into abys with various recent events.
Many thanks for this initiative, to say hello from DOTS team.
It is amazing to see such experience on DOTS team, with many well known titles experience in the backyard.
Hey, thanks for the question @Fancisco_Greco . We cannot comment on any individual’s situation.
However, I can tell you that after having immensely and positively impacted our DOTS efforts, Mike moved on to other projects within Unity about 10 months ago. @jivalenzuela has been leading our DOTS engineering efforts since then with great success!
I just want to say I’m glad to here this and thanks for all the hard work your DOT’s team has done. I’m really glad because DOTS is awesome, after using it so much I could not imagine using another engine without it. It allows me being a very average to sub par programmer to make things much faster, and then for that code to run insanely fast with burst and even be multithreaded with no race conditions that I have to worry about. Its ridiculous how good it is, just gotta convince more people to use it, because they really should.
Thanks for thinking to offer the community some reassurance! DOTS feels like a forward-thinking labor of love during a time when shortsighted business decisions threaten the livelihoods of so many. I have become a convert after building a small game in ECS. Can you share what percentage of the DOTS workforce was affected by downsizing?
These are reassuring news, looking forward to the launch of the official version!
by the way, is there plan to implement dynamic loading baker? Roguelike be in need of that。
Polish up the ecosystem around DOTS please.
Unity really doesn’t need all those fancy features to compete with UE.
DOTS is enough to put any non-DOD engines in shame.
If you know it, you know how good it is. Don’t argue with the uninitiated.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
is there plan to implement dynamic loading baker? Roguelike be in need of that。
I’m afraid not - runtime conversion is largely incompatible with the data pipeline that we’re trying to build that has a clean separation between editor and runtime features. If you have a use-case you feel isn’t possible otherwise I’d love to know more.
The only comment I’ll make about DOTS and the recent news is that DOTS has been, and is, a high priority for Unity and we’re adequately resourced to hit our current plans.
Thank you for bringing DOTS into existence. DOTS might be challenging to me, but it’s fun and satisfying compared to the old OOP workflow. Looking forward to the 1.0 final and beyond.
Any plan to resume and invest resources to project tiny development again? I would like to see it happen very soon. Currently I have project needs to target both super lightweight web mobile and desktop but I forced to use another engine to target super lightweight web mobile which is different workflow and different programming language which is really annoying and time consuming. WebGL platform is not the option of me since I need to get super small game build size and I believe currently lots of mobile phones still can’t support WebGL platform properly yet.
Hi, DOTS changed how I think about writing game code about 3 years ago, still going strong!
Do you plan to release new tech deep dive talks? Most of the Jobs/Burst/ECS talks are from 2019-2020 date (Mike Acton, Joachim Ante etc.). I wish we had more talks about the recent features as I love seeing the design decisions and reasoning behind them.
Is Joachim around here? I haven’t seen him make on any Unity talks for a while. The CEO did the keynote speech too.
i don’t need runtime conversion, just need a way to load baked result in editor.
is there way load serialize baked prefab?
subscene only have one prefab seem a way to do that but stupid!
I originally went into the industry as a junior desperate to be a gameplay programmer, but very quickly fell into working on the tech side. In the end, I found it to be incredibly satisfying to build frameworks and utilities to enable gameplay programmers, designers and artists to express their creative vision. This led me to work on in-house engines, and later here at Unity!