Hi everyone. I am curious if there is a page somewhere that tracks the implementation status of different features in DOTS. For instance, I am interested in integrating SkinnedMeshRenderer style animation in DOTS, but it seems like, as of now, that is not supported. I am only surmising this from searching on Google and the forums for related information and since I don’t find any relevant information, I am assuming it has yet to be implemented.
It would be great if there was a status page of some sort that showed which systems Unity plans to bring to DOTS and display their status if it is currently implemented, scheduled for a specific release, currently in development, or in a backlog. It would also be nice to have it link to related documentation for the systems in question that are available. Does something like this exist and somehow has eluded me, or do I just need to get up to speed on exactly where DOTS is now and keep up-to-date on all DOTS related news?
You can look at what was shown at GDC or this roadmap/slides(Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life), or the changelog in the package manager(git repo isn’t updated anymore). They seem to be focused on physics right now, all we have for animations atm are shader based or hybrid.
I support having a status page, with all the systems that are being converted, current package version, current status (internal/preview/released) and next Unity version in which it will upgrade status.
It’s essential for our planning.
I mean, I’m about to start a UI system. If it’s a month away to preview, I can wait. If it’s a year away, I need to sketch something right now.
I’m not sure if anyone at Unity fully knows that state of all the work that is being done. I think there are a lot of different teams in different divisions that have their own timelines and some are jumping on DOTS faster than others. And some are jumping on DOTS for backend and exposing a MonoBehaviour frontend. Here’s what I’ve been able to gather:
Preview toys we have as packages:
DOTS Core
Multi-scene streaming
Multi-scene authoring
Rigid Mesh Rendering
Audio
Physics
Tiny
Toys available on GitHub
Cinemachine (despite what the package.json says, it is using a relatively up-to-date version of ECS)
Joachim’s GPU animation (temporary example solution using latest ECS)
Clues and speculation about future DOTS stuff
Animation - I think it is going to be a while until we see a more full animation solution. I remember seeing a recent post about how animation was going to be similar to Playables, but wasn’t going to be Playables. I think the original intent was for Playables to work with DOTS but the idea was scrapped as they evolved in different directions. So I think they are in the design phases for a new animation system. And the fact that Joachim made the temporary solution furthers my suspicion. Current animation work is using DOTS for MonoBehaviours approach.
Lights - They are coming in the next ECS release!
Custom Meshes - 2019.3
Terrain - There’s a custom collider for it coming. But there’s no authoring workflow for it.
animation is on the staging registry(has been for some time) though I have not yet been able to get it to work
audio also recently popped up there too.
I think Joachim’s GPU animation package is more of a different way to leverage dots(animation), to cover different use cases rather than being temporary.
Oh interesting. I might have to dig through the staging registry this weekend and see if I can’t figure it out.
But I definitely agree that Joachim’s approach covers a use case quite opposite of how Unity has traditionally done animation (and how I’m guessing their new animation will work). The only reason I think it is temporary is because I have a hard time imagining the new animation system not including a variant of the technique. The technique is the only technique I know to render animated meshes at massive scale, and that’s just too DOTS for it to not be an included feature.
Thanks everyone for the good information! I feel like I have a decent grasp as to what state DOTS is in now. Thanks, @DreamingImLatios , for breaking it all down. Joachim’s GPU Animation project looks very interesting. I will check it out!
And if Joachim or anyone else in Unity is reading this, could we potentially get a status page for all things DOTS?
From GDC the best I could determine is that only the core API will be marked as stable by fall. If, like me, you are building a product you intend to ship in the next few years assume that you will need a hybrid approach for the long-term foreseeable future.
As an example, for animation I have taken the following approach to stay job-ified and avoid touching Unity components in my core ECS game loop.
I have a data-driven description of the animations defined in a scriptable object:
I then have two systems. The first is my AnimationSystem running in FixedUpdate. It knows how to operate on the ECS data and controls times, transitions, etc. I can job-ify this because it never needs to touch Unity objects, it just mutates the state of my Entity’s animation.
My other system is the AnimationPresentationSystem. This one runs in the PresentationSystemGroup and simply feeds the current animation state into the PlayableGraphInstance. This one touches Unity (via the Playables API) and thus must be a regular ComponentSystem.
I’ve taken this approach all over my code-base to segregate regular Unity from pure-ECS code. It’s working very well across systems as diverse as steering, pathfinding, AI, and more.
Incredible rundown of how to gather an animation working in an ECS system. Any chance you’d be willing to throw this onto a mixamo character in a standalone project and put it up on GitHub? I think I understand what’s going on, but I’m still trying to grok how you switch animation from Walmart to run or run to fall down for example. And how do frames update?
My goal for next week is getting ECS animation working, so I’ll be digging in to this over the next seven days or so.
