In the pinned thread titled “New SubScene & ConvertToEntity workflows” It seems to be mentioned that tools for working for pure ECS, e.g. not the convert workflow, would be coming and the last comment expressing this i could find said ‘soon’ but that was back in late April. Is there any news or updates on the current state of the tools? The convert workflow, at least for me, seems like a round about way of doing things so a set of dedicated tools would be nice.
You can get an idea of what they’re considering looking at the latest project tiny: https://forum.unity.com/threads/project-tiny-c-preview-0-15-3-available.688969/
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“Soon” in terms of any development, may mean anything from months to years.
In terms of Unity releases time frames, that probably at least few releases ahead. Which considering each release per 3 months on average, that gives quite a bit of time …
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So if I’m reading correctly if I install project tiny I can use the dots tools for normal development or only Project Tiny based projects? If so that’d be perfect for now and if not guess I’m working on my own to use until Unity’s soon rolls around.
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It is just for Project Tiny at the moment. The direct DOTS editor doesn’t have the tooling yet to scale to larger games. GameObjectConversion scales surprisingly well. Actually I prefer it in some sense because it keeps my authoring representation separate from my runtime data, and I personally find it easier to customize the inspector fields using a MonoBehaviour than a custom editor script. The lack of playmode iteration can be a little annoying, but there are workarounds if you know what you are doing.
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I haven’t tried to Project Tiny DOTS editor yet so excuse me if this is a dumb question but are you saying that the dot’s editor doesn’t allow you to edit your component data without a custom editor script? Or just not while the game is running?
DOTs doesn’t have same editor tooling as Project Tiny. Yes, DOTs, is much more raw in terms of editor. Project Tiny probably could say, is more exploring way for the editor, with this new paradigm. When that will be solid, will be transferred as well to DOTs. Or something like that.
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GameObjectConversion limitation. Tiny DOTS has different issues which are bigger show-stoppers for me. Tiny DOTS doesn’t have prefabs (though you can kinda fake them), and the inspectors for components and buffers expose the runtime data directly which makes for a rather awkward authoring workflow. I know Unity is working on tools to address those issues, and likely when those tools reach a state Unity feels comfortable sharing, that’s when we will likely see the Tiny DOTS editor become the not-Tiny DOTS editor too.
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Tiny’s DOTS editor is called DOTS Mode, it’s not Tiny Mode and according the staff comments, it will eventually work for all DOTS related things.
Do note that you CAN use some of the full ECS packages in current DOTS editor but since most are currently designed to be used with the conversion workflow, that’s not going to help much. Nor is the fact that you can’t use hybrid renderer or 3D cameras on DOTS Mode atm.
Our focus is on making the GameObject → Entity conversion workflow production ready.
We will do a lot with visualizing converted state, warnings / error overlays in inspector, live conversion, asset database caching, player live connect over the next half year.
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Any ETA when will it be possible to serialize scenes for 32 bit os? Requirement support for Arm-v7 devices prevents us from using the SceneConversion workflow in production.
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@Joachim_Ante_1
Please tell me that Entities is not going to be released until there’s a stable pure entity editor. The plan for leaving preview is 2020.1, right?
Our editing tools are game objects with a conversion pipeline. We are heavily investing into integrating all that deep into the editor, with visualization, picking, live link etc. As well as a lot of work to reduce boilerplate from the conversion workflow.
The authoring scene format for DOTS remains the same game object based scenes we have today. If you are judging it based on what is there today, what we are talking about is a very different workflow.
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Well, what I mean here is a two-way link between the authoring GameObject and the entity. e.g. The entity’s transform is updated and that change is reflected in the authoring GameObject’s transform. Also, for that, the entity not being destroyed if its subscene is opened for editing in play mode.
Both of those things are planned. The second one is how it works in the next release.
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Will the normal Unity Editor api still be used for creating custom editors with full access to C#? We have an extensive suite of custom editors here spanning years of work, and I cant see us being able to make a switch to dots someday unless we can still do everything our current editors do (besides game related stuff like dialogs and quests we also use services like Amazon Polly to auto create placeholder VO, etc). Im using the editors to create c# files, so im hoping the editors can roughly stay the same but write appropriate dots files instead.
If we can still use the old EditorGuiLayout stuff Ill be thrilled since I could probably just change our save/load code and reuse the editors as is.
In the Tiny talk from Unite 2019, they mention they are changing Project Tiny to use the conversion workflow in their next release… so I guess “DOTS mode” editor has been cancelled and they are going full steam towards the conversion pipeline.
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thats accurate.
Inspectors or any editor code is thus pretty much entirely unaffected by anything DOTS related. The same is true for the MonoBehaviours that are used as the authoring representation. Commonly you would use the MonoBehaviour representation that was used as the runtime representation in the existing Unity, as the authoring representation for DOTS. This makes it so you wouldn’t even have to change any prefabs / scene data…
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@Joachim_Ante_1
Are there any plans on improving editor tools for directly manipulate entities? Two things I dream about are:
- Better entity inspector. Right now when you select entity in editor all its values are read-only in the inspector, would be very helpful to be able to tweak data in the inspector, and also to be able to add/remove entity components
- Single entity serialization. Are there plans to have serialized entity-prefab-files?
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There are no plans for that. Our authoring format is game objects and it already supports add / remove component.
Being able to do tweaks that are not persisted on components could make sense.