I’ve stayed on the sideline for a while, hoping that DOTS would be ready for the next game.
Not that I particularly care for 100x, it’s the programming discipline that I need.
So when I read in the blog that the focus is on mono and, elsewhere on the forum, that preview packages are being hidden, I wonder: will DOTS become an internal project only for all of 2021?
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From the reddit road map forums
“Mike Acton here. It’s clear the roadmap and expectations for DOTS have been confusing quite a few of our users. We intend to clarify the road to DOTS in a future blog post for everyone”
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Merci
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I think they reduced visibility of DOTS since a good portion of the tech isn’t publicly available yet or is too immature for widespread production use (e.g. DOTS animation and its tooling). This won’t change anytime soon.
It makes sense to focus on gameobject tech in the mean time while DOTS slowly matures and becomes eventually easy to use for most users in a few years.
However, it makes no sense to turn it into a completely internal project since some bits like core ECS are quite stable.
IMHO GameObjects and such as before for authoring and ECS conversion implicitly when possible.
I think the issue is that plenty of people see the preview packages in the package manager, completely ignore the fact that it’s written “preview” next to those packages, and then complain that the packages are unstable and/or that the APIs change
It’s unfortunate that they have to be hidden now, but I do understand Unity’s decision
Breaking changes still happen in Entities though (I had problems with 0.14)
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Stuff always breaks when it or something connected is under active development regardless if preview or released.
Also your character controller project is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with Entities, not unlike the Unity sample projects. Personally, I use it in a simple and straightforward setup and it works nicely. However, I don’t expect the full feature set of mono/gameobject tech with DOTS right now.
I think the marketing hype from the Unite’s was also partly guilty with the generation of wrong expectations.
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This, I think Unity does (and should) make preview packages technically un-easy to import, to ensure there is a minimum amount of determination and skill among early adopters. So the forum (and bug reports) are focused and can communicate effectively, and filter out people like me that would distract things with “babys first null pointer” posts.