Persistent entities even after closing the editor

Unity Engine
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1

Hi, I’m new the ECS and I would like to know if ECS will solve a particular use case that I’m having.

In my previous project I had a lot of pre-calculated data (calculated in editor mode) and that was saved into traditional gameObjects which are serialized by Unity.

Since there were too many of them, I ended up having thousands of gameObjects polluting the scene and making working with the editor almost impossible.

I wanted now to replace those gameObjects (that used to contain camera’s data) with entities, ie: create them in editor mode, set some values per entity, being able to query them in editor/play mode and i want them to be persistent (calculated data persists even after closing the editor).

I managed to create entities in editor mode by instantiating a World object and then using its EntityManager to create entities but I don’t know yet how to “save” them and If what I’m trying to do is doable with ECS.

Thanks for your help!

2

Is there a reason you were not using ScriptableObject at first place? You could use those too for ECS (requires some additional work on top, but they do the job, here is an example: https://forum.unity.com/threads/code-and-template-for-singleton-scriptableobjects-to-ecs.756794/#post-5039336 ).

3

SubScenes is sample of “persistent” entities representation.

1 Like
4

Yes, I was not using ScriptableObjects because I want them to be in the scene for visualization/perform additional actions on them.
That means that, even if I have all the data as scriptableObjects, to visualize them and do “per object” actions, i need to attach the scriptableObject instance to some gameObject in the scene.

That was what was causing the editor to be impossible to use. To many instances of gameObjects in the scene and that’s why I would like to use Entities instead, because the are lightweight objects.

5

Don’t try and generate entities via EntityManager if you’re making camera positions/angles, the SubScene/hybrid conversion workflow seems like it should be all you need