Unity Released ECS 1.0 - Production-Ready Finally - for Unity 2022.2+ with the following packages:
- Entities: A foundational package that enables ECS in Unity
- Unity Physics and Havok Physics for Unity: ECS-compatible physics engines that enable deterministic large-scale simulations
- Netcode for Entities: A netcode package that supports the creation of ambitious multiplayer games
- Entities Graphics: A graphics package which enables batching large amounts of ECS data to Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipelines (SRP), including Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)
The Entities package, part of Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), provides a data-oriented implementation of the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture.
DOTS - a paradigm for game development with Unity, a combination of technologies and packages that delivers a data-oriented design (DOD) approach to building games in Unity (instead of OOP). Applying data-oriented design to a game’s architecture empowers game creators to scale processing in a highly performant manner, allowing large-scale game experiences.
I’m keeping a close eye on DOTS, but I haven’t used it once - I didn’t have such tasks with open worlds or with a large amount of objects on the scene.
At the moment, this stack needs to be considered as an architectural solution for your target project, although at some point it seemed that this would be the only way to build a project in Unity in the future. But just like Unity UI (uGUI) & UI Toolkit, DOD and OOP still peacefully coexist, although all new features appear in the UI Toolkit only…
Did you use ECS for your Projects?
Resources:
- DOTS, Megacity, Tutorials.
- Unity acquired Unity Asset called [Rival - a powerful ECS-based character controller] which has been built for extensibility and performance with networking in mind
- ECS Racing, a competitive multiplayer racing sample - part of “Netcode for Entities” package.
- [ECS Swarms] - creating fantastic simulations of birds, fish, etc.
- [DOTS Plus]
- [DOTS Mesh Slicer]
- [Official] Chat with us directly about all things ECS on Dev Blitz Day , December 8, 7 am–7 pm ET
