Entities Package visibility question

scarface117 · August 29, 2020, 8:30am

Hi, I’ve been learning the new ECS/DOTS unity framework for the past 4 months, and I just recently stumbled upon a situation where I couldn’t find the Entities package available anymore.

After some research, a friend of mine shared this ( Visibility changes for preview packages in 2020.1 ) with me, and then I noticed one of the packages that was pulled off from visibility was Unity.Entities.

I’m just curious on why this package was pulled off from visibility, since I’ve been investing some time in learning it, so I just want to be sure this won’t be deprecated at some point.

Regards.

MNNoxMortem · August 29, 2020, 12:41pm

Read the linked thread.

scarface117 · August 29, 2020, 11:01pm

Could you be more specific? The thread is like 4 pages long

burningmime · August 29, 2020, 11:32pm

Explained in the blog post: Unity Blog

In a company-wide effort, we reevaluated our package list to identify preview packages that are either more experimental than production-ready, or else not under active development. In Unity 2020.1 and later versions, preview packages in those categories will not be listed in the Package Manager. However, if you’ve already installed these preview packages, they won’t be removed from your projects – you can continue to use them, and they will still be able to receive the available updates.

Our intention is to include preview packages in the Package Manager when the development team believes that the package will be verified within that version’s release cycle. For example, if a preview package is visible in the Package Manager in Unity 2020.1, we plan for it to be verified by the time we reach the Unity 2020 LTS release. Naturally, things can change, but this is the initial guidepost we have used to filter which packages are visible.

They don’t plan for entities to be verified by the time 2020.2 releases. So it’s hidden. Personally, I wish they’d unhide collections (or at least move NativeList to core), since that one is extremely important to using jobs/burst (at least half my jobs would not be possible without it – aside from recreating that functionality locally), but c’est la vie.