…the long way round to copying/duplicating entities?
Unity has to parse the GOs components then convert them to Entities and then attach them to their systems?
Is or should there be a duplicate entity API that allows any set of Game Entities once created to be duplicated without having to be converted?
In effect going from a parse and create instantiation process to a memcpy and amend approach.
This could not only allow for massive speed improvements in procedural games, but should also allow static worlds with repeating elements to be much quicker to load as you only need to convert the first element then duplicate and amend them where needed.
You already can do this with EntityManager.Instantiate to duplicate entities, LinkedEntityGroup dynamic buffer to duplicate related entities when using Instantiate and Prefab (Prefab component will be automatically removed from the new entity) component to keep an entity from be queried (you can force to query Prefab entities adding the Prefab component in the query or setting the options of an EntityQueryDec).