Did you read my last post on ECS in Unity? I did a little introduction to this new approach to programming available with Unity DOTS. It’s “little” different to what we are used to in Unity, but is it a bad thing? Let’s talk!
‼️ Oh, and keep in mind that ECS is still in preview (preview.33 – 0.0.12) at point of writing this post! But it will be fun to revisit it in the future ? ‼️
If you missed whole ECS thing, let me update you! ECS stands for Entity Component System, and it’s part of what is currently known as DOTS, which is Data-Oriented Technology Stack.
There is more to DOTS, but I won’t go deep into it here. Let’s stick to ECS.
Currently, with MonoBehaviours, we are playing in an Object-Oriented environment. With ECS we are going somewhere completely different.
Is it a good or a bad thing? I wouldn’t put it like that. It’s not any harder then what we have now. It’s just different.
And I think this is the whole problem with it. Not everyone likes to learn new things, especially as here you have to almost forget what did you know about Unity… ?
Well… Almost. ?
I believe that these are just reactions to something completely new.
Probably I’m even exaggerating a little bit, but other than that I have to say that I love the challenge that ECS presents. It’s new, requires some learning, but the benefits of it are humongous!
At least countless videos tell that… ?
DOTS is oriented on performance, and I would love to test it soon. I’m planning to dive into Burst Compiling and Job System, which are essential for the performance gains.
But there are also some limitations to ECS.
At this point, It’s hard to justify building the whole game only using it. I can’t imagine building UI on it as it would be too much of a hustle! At least this is my first thoughts on that after making a few prototypes.
We have to keep it in mind still that ECS is in preview so that Unity Developers will add more new things to it! And I’m really looking forward to it!
However, until that time, we can play and build our own components! ?
So what are your thoughts on ECS? Are you hyped about it? Let me know in the comment section below!
If you want more ECS content, join my newsletter, as I’m planning to create more content about it in the coming weeks! ?
And I hope to see you back soon! ?