I’ve been intrigued by ECS since the first glimpses were revealed and am eager to start using it in my projects. I’m probably opening myself up to a bit of a spanking for asking this, but when will it be safe to start using this for projects that are intended to be released? I’ve seen some of the blog posts about people and companies using it on projects that going to be released for mobile later this year. Does this mean it will be moving out of preview? Or is this something that can be used in production without needing to worry about the preview status?
Thanks for any guidance.
Use at your own risk. There will be pain. Not all the core features of classical Unity are implemented in ECS. But all of classical Unity is there too. And the ECS packages come as source code you can freely browse and modify with package embedding if you really want to.
It is probably not going to move out of preview any time soon. And the fact that it is in preview means that there will be issues you may or may not decide to worry about. But with time and effort those issues can be worked around, and the community here is really good and includes several people from Unity working on ECS.
Some studios use it fully knowing the risks. Other studios use it disregarding the risks. And yet many more studios are waiting for it to stabilize.
But the choice is ultimately yours to make.
And regardless of what decision you make, don’t forget to prototype!
Thanks for the feedback. I’m a solo developer and have been wanting to get going with this but didn’t want to have it become a bottleneck in my release waiting for everything to come out of preview. If you’re saying what I think you are (that you can create and release builds with the packages still in preview) then I don’t see a reason not to get integrating with ECS.
And a big yes on the prototyping. Also on the community. These forums and obviously the people in them have guided my butt out of the fire on more than one occasion.