Instantiating an Entity through GameObject with ConvertToEntity?

Unity Engine
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1

I’m starting to dip my toes into this ECS stuff since I think it’s gonna be required to develop the game I’m hoping to build, but due to it all being new I’m likely going to be posting a ton of questions here. For starters, why have I not come across anyone instantiating an entity by using the standard Instantiate(gameobject) method, with the gameobject having the ConvertToEntity component?

There are lots of tutorials for instantiating a new entity using a prefab, but they generally have you convert to an entity in the code, and the instantiate that entity. From my initial experiment, it seems like just directly instantiating the gameobject prefab with a ConvertToEntity component results in the same thing, but is much easier. Are there any downsides to doing this?

2

Probably because devs do some i code manipulations while creating Entities prefabs. Then instantiating via code actual entities.

3

You usually want to keep a reference to the entity so that you can instantiate clones of it rather than instantiate new GameObjects and rerun conversion. That’s surprisingly tricky to do with ConvertToEntity.