Should I start my first project with ECS?

Getting Started
1

I’m new to unity and I’ve seen few videos on ECS, it seems to be the future of unity and the way the code is written makes total sense to me.
For my first project I’m creating a turn based 2D rpg game and I’m wondering if I should start my first project and learning process with ECS? or it’s still too early.
Would I encounter any problem with other parts of unity like animation or UI?
Are there enough ECS users that I have a good chance of finding answers when I encounter something I don’t understand or know how to do?

2

I think ECS is still too new; it’s likely to have bugs, weak support, etc. And no, you won’t find too many other users who would be able to help you. So my recommendation would not be to jump in with both feet at this point.

On the other hand, who knows? If it makes sense to you, maybe you’ll become an expert in that area before most of us who have been using Unity for many years. And that’s not such a bad thing.

3

We have DOTS dedicated forum, where community is actually pretty active.
But it expects quite decent understanding of C# and level of autonomy.
By all means, anyone is welcome to ask there questions.

Regarding, if should start first Unity project with DOTS, personally I would suggest built up strong foothold, in understanding editor, even DOTS is majorly oriented with scripting. There are things, which refer to editor, and strong understanding of it, will help you a lot. Also understanding differences and how to script things, is rather important.

So at least spent some time, building some prototypes. These making sure, you are confident operating Unity in decent manner. Learning debugging and profiling tools and methods, also is must.

4

I’d recommend at some point building a working prototype of something using the classic approach, just so you are familiar with both.

5

My recommendation is to learn the old way if you’re completely new, but if you have programming experience there is no reason why you couldn’t use both. Unity DOTS and MonoBehaviour together will be the way most people will go for the foreseeable future.

Yes and no. Unity DOTS is currently in an incomplete state. Only some of the features you would normally have access to through the old approach have been implemented. Worst case though you can just have code written the old way to handle those features.

Yes. Most of them occupy the beta section dedicated to it but some of them have started to trickle into Scripting.

https://forum.unity.com/forums/data-oriented-technology-stack.147/
https://forum.unity.com/forums/scripting.12/

6

thanks everybody, I will try to learn more about the mono-behavior and the old way of coding over the time like you have suggested, even though mono-behavior always was the wall between me and unity.
Fortunately anything I’ve seen from DOTS sounds very welcoming and simple, I just need to find the bare minimum I can get away with and learn that. ^^