itβs deterministic vodka
#archived-dots
storm ravine
urban rivet
True I think I could predict exactly what happens
safe lintel
haha
gusty comet
Gosh I want to generate gameobject from entities because I need to move them in the scene. I gave up and just spawn GameObject and then create the entity. But the transform position and the position component won't syncronize π¦
solar ridge
Isnt a vodka logo of a goose
Geese are aquatic buoyant animals so it shall float
You'll need to add the copy from (which ever one you are changing) component
coarse turtle
@gusty comet use the CopyTransformToGameObject component so you can sync the position to the actual game object
also lol to all the vodka stuff π
solar ridge
Im curious if I can edit the layout of the components in the inspector when selected in the entity debugger
Recipient:Id length and buffer are of an array. It would be nice if I could make that use the tostring
gusty comet
@coarse turtle but I also want to be able to move it inside the scene. Seems like using both components broke stuff, the position isn't right
coarse turtle
Like this?
And you wouldn't want to manipulate both the original transform and the position component at the same time π€ sounds like a recipe for a race condition disaster
old atlas
Hi, does anybody know about any example/resource that explains how to use the new GameObjectConversionSystem, GameObjectConversionUtility and WorldDiff features?
coarse turtle
ah sorry I haven't touched those yet :c
safe lintel
tertle posted something that looked handy on the forums https://forum.unity.com/threads/simulation-and-rendering-in-different-worlds.627403/#post-4213921
was meaning to try it out but havent gotten around to it yet
gusty comet
@coarse turtle No I need to use the gameobject transform because it's to move 3d objects in the scene. Or maybe I should just do another build for this because it's temporary anyway ^^"
coarse turtle
So In that gif, I put a PositionComponent and CopyTransformToGameObjectComponent on a camera and if you want to move the "gameObject" you would manipulate the Position associated with that entity
Unless you're talking about being able to move the gameObject with scene tools
gusty comet
yeah but you can't use the basic tools which manipualte the transform
old atlas
@safe lintel I will check it out, thanks
gusty comet
well I'm going t make two build in the end. I don't know why I didn't think about it before x)
Moving the transform is just to correct some data we have
coarse turtle
You can try to write a scene tool which writes to the PositionComponent if you need a perma solution
gusty comet
Could be interresting, I'll keep that in mind thanks ^^
sharp nacelle
I know this is technically a JobSystem question and less of an ECS question, but does anyone know how to actually enable "Full StackTraces" on native collection leaks? Apparently I am missing a few disposes and I don't know where.
manic aurora
huh does it not give you the full trace in the console detail window when you click a specific error?
sharp nacelle
not on the "memory leak" errors of NativeArrays. It only says one should enable Full Stacktraces.
It says something about enabling a define, but well, we don't really have access to the C++ part of the engine, so I hope there's another way.
silk basin
Theres a dropdown menu in the toolbar that has options for the job system including the full stack trace i believe @sharp nacelle
frosty siren
Is it ok to use interfaces with ComponentData?
I understand that the design of ECS and DOD in general tells me that I have to separate the logic and data, but I have a case where I have the same data structures with the same update logic, but with a different interaction logic. And I want to put it in one system.
green lynx
how do you guys deal with race conditions in a hybrid system? ex. initialization
like I spawn a bunch of entities using a MonoBehaviour, but then when I try to GetComponentGroup in OnCreateManager() the entities don't exist yet
frosty siren
@green lynx do u mean that your OnCreateManager() executed earlier than your MonoBehaviour?
green lynx
@frosty siren bingo
frosty siren
@green lynx i thought about call Mono's Start() in OnCreatManager() but you should come up with how to cache your Mono in system.
Also when we need to get EntityManager we use GetOrCreateManager(Type), may be u can use CreateManager(Type) in your Mono to create system manually and be ensure that it's already created.
green lynx
@frosty siren Thanks! I'll try CreateManager in the MonoBehaviour script
untold night
@frosty siren - if the data behavior is similar enough, you might be able to work around it with jobs that implement the interface and operate on the data instead. Combine this with a system that has generic paramters to slot in the necessary Job types, that should make it possible to do what you want.
Two possible issues might crop up:
- Generic systems don't hook themselves up when you use the default world bootstrap, you'll have to add them manually and update the playerloop after you do so.
- I don't know how well this would play with burst jobs. as long as the types are blittable it probably should. Since you'd just be defining a struct that fulfills a interaface requirement, and the job system works just fine, that shouldn't be part of any burst issues you run up against.
something along these lines:
public interface IMyCustomAdd<T,U>
{
T Value { get; set; }
NativeArray<U> Results { get; set; }
}
[BurstCompile]
struct AddOnesInt2 : IJobParallelFor, IMyCustomAdd<int,int2>
{
int _value;
NativeArray<int2> _results;
public T Value
{
get => _value;
set => _value = value;
}
public NativeArray<int2> Results
{
get => _results;
set => _results = value;
}
public void Execute(int index)
{
_results[index] = _results[index] + int2(_value);
}
}
public class MyParallelForCustomAdder<T, U, V> : JobComponentSystem
where T : struct, IMyCustomAdd<U, V>, IJobParallelFor
{
//....
protected override JobHandle OnUpdate(JobHandle inputDeps)
{
T addJob = new T();
addJob.Value = 42;
addJob.Results = _MyCustomResultsArray;
JobHandle addJobHandle = addJob.Schedule(_MyCustomResultsArray.Length, 64);
return addJobHandle;
}
}
This obviously wouldn't be in ONE system, but a bunch of similar systems could be updated as part of a single group and potentially all be working in parallel if they don't touch the same component types.
green lynx
yoo I just figured out GetComponentGroup wasn't working because I was trying to get the component wrapper instead of the actual component. OTL I'm an idiot
manic aurora
if i have multiple worlds and have a sync point in one of them (for example, i need to run a command buffer to create or modify some entities before starting the next job), does that always mean i have to block for all worlds until that's complete? i can't see how the answer isn't yes, but it's a bummer when some of my worlds do not depend on one another whatsoever
sharp nacelle
@silk basin wow thank you, I must have been too blind to see that π I only remember turning the thing on, but I didn't see the Full Stack Traces entry. Thanks!
solar ridge
Is there anyway to iterate over all sharedcomponentdata in a job?
Trying to create a spawnjob with a prefab, and while there are likely other ways, I feel knowing how to iterate over sharedcomponents in a job would be handy regardless
solar ridge
Entertaining though even non jobified:
lime dome
cube cubed
tawdry tree
Abstract art? Or is this actually supposed to do something useful?
EDIT: I mean, it's pretty and all, but I'm wonder a bit WTH I'm looking at
solar ridge
Spawns around points determined in editor
Just lots of cubes to determine scalability
Longest running system is 5ms and that is the renderer they have atm
Though I still need to try to get the spawner to be in a job to not block main thread while spawning.
Buffer.Instantiate(Gameobject) would be nice
solar ridge
Alternatively how would one pass a shareddata to a job to use for setting data for a new entity?
I was thinking readonly worked but apparently not
untold night
that is some nice rock salt, at least
solar ridge
XD
Trying to pass a RenderMesh to a job and it is proving more difficult than I anticipated
Unless there is a way I am missing how to use Buffer.Instantiate(entity) with preloaded data
Update: Was infact missing how Instatiate worked: Also Prefab component is pretty neat
var gameObject = Resources.Load<GameObject>("Cube");
_template = EntityManager.Instantiate(gameObject);
EntityManager.AddComponentData(_template, new Prefab());
Would be nice if a PrefabComponent came with an existing wrapper
lime dome
solar ridge
LOoooool I hadnt thought about it
manic aurora
does EntityArchetypeQuery work for yall? when i call GetComponentGroup with my query it won't select the correct overload...
solar ridge
_query = GetComponentGroup(new EntityArchetypeQuery {
All = new[] {ComponentType.Create<Desired>()},
Any = Array.Empty<ComponentType>(),
None = new[] {ComponentType.Create<Undesired>()}
});
oh...my error was in a dumb place, i had a type wrong, thank you
rugged wagon
I'm wanting to learn more about ECS. I can easily find some tutorials on youtube, but I'm curious what people who are using ECS regularly recommend
untold night
I'd say grab the source packages in 2018.3 or 2019.1b and look at a lot of the scripts themselves. The current tutorials are good for the overall theory, but some of the specifics are out of date.
That being said, they've hinted at massive update circa GDC In march and I wouldn't be suprised if they push a bunch of the talks up asap like they did last time.
Since one of the goals is to have a lot of the core bits done between 2019.1 - 2019.2 expect to see better/more tutorials and more stable samples during or after that time.
A good book to get your hands on to really understand the mindset is the data oriented design book: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1916478700
A sampling of the contents (but not the whole thing) is here: http://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/
The formatting is hard to read on the website.
vivid relic
Hey all. Im returning to ECS after a while to fiddle around with it again. I see a lot has changed, and I'm even having trouble just spawning a thing with a RenderMesh on it. Am I understanding correctly that EntityManager.Instantiate(prefab) should grab all the ECS components I have on my prefab? I'm getting "Invalid AABB Result". This is with the new Hybrid Renderer
tawdry tree
The prefab is a hybrid GO/entity, right?
vivid relic
Yeah, looks like this : http://prntscr.com/mlxdmm
Console spam looks like this : http://prntscr.com/mlxdyt
tawdry tree
Hmm, you might be using the wrong component for the rendering part, mine looks like this
vivid relic
I just started the project today, so MeshInstanceRenderer doesnt exist anymore
tawdry tree
That said, I'm using preview21, not the current 23
vivid relic
in the newest versions, that is. Its been moved to Hybrid Renderer package and renamed RenderMesh
hmm... Perhaps I should just try and roll back
tawdry tree
I updated to see if my code still works, getting Assembly has reference to non-existent assembly 'Unity.PerformanceTesting' (Packages/com.unity.entities/Unity.Entities.PerformanceTests/Unity.Entities.PerformanceTests.asmdef)
Which is great because I can't actually edit that to fix it
vivid relic
You need to add something to the manifest
"com.unity.test-framework.performance": "0.1.49-preview",
I think its that one
tawdry tree
So I actually need to edit the manifest now? Didn't do it the first time, though I noticed it was listed in the getting started guides
vivid relic
Apparently for this version you do. Its under Project_Folder/Packages/Manifest.json
tawdry tree
Now it's Could not load file or assembly 'Smash, Version=0.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. but it does render the thing, at least
vivid relic
Strange. Does the MeshInstanceRenderer component still exist?
tawdry tree
Nope, I changed from that
So my system grabs the renderer on initialization (AfterSceneLoad)
_boidRenderer = ECSUtilities.GetLookFromPrototype("GameobjectInSceneName");
The method looks like this
using Unity.Rendering;
using UnityEngine;
public static class ECSUtilities {
public static RenderMesh GetLookFromPrototype(string protoName) {
var proto = GameObject.Find(protoName);
var result = proto.GetComponent<RenderMeshComponent>().Value;
return result;
}
}
But I forgot why I do that. I think I instantiate things different from you
vivid relic
Yeah, I do it differently
{
foreach (var spawner in spawners)
{
var prefab = EntityManager.GetSharedComponentData<ShipSpawner>(spawner).prefab;
var entity = EntityManager.Instantiate(prefab);
var position = EntityManager.GetComponentData<Position>(spawner);
EntityManager.SetComponentData(entity, position);
EntityManager.DestroyEntity(spawner);
}
}```Hmm, yeah, I use entityManager.CreateEntity(archetype) and set the renderer as a sharedcomponent
vivid relic
I must have misunderstood how its meant to work. I thought you could make prefabs, set all your stuff on them, and then instantiate with EntityManager, and it would copy over all the components into "pure" world
tawdry tree
Tip: When using triple backtick code blocks, write 'csharp' directly after the first backticks(and then add a newline) to get code highlighting
vivid relic
ty
tawdry tree
Also, it's a bit of a bother, but you might wanna consider converting all tabs to double spaces, just for sharing, since Discord makes the tabs really big
Hmm, yeah, without further testing, it looks to me like the instantiate method should work
vivid relic
it instantiates just fine if I remove RenderMeshComponent, and LocalToWorldComponent. I can even tell that my thrust system works on this entity (it has a thrust component), in the entity debugger. But if I put rendering components back on, it freaks out with AABB errors.
tawdry tree
Yeah, I remember having AABB errors at some point, but don't remember how I fixed it. A quick search suggest there might be an issue with the rotation quaternion? At least some matrix shit (the math kind, not movie).
EDIT: The thread suggests to check for NaN in your code to see where it breaks
vivid relic
Good call!
There was NaNs in the position component, so I'm doing something wrong there
tawdry tree
great!
tawdry tree
But I really just googled 'unity ecs AABB error' and chose the tops result, so shame on you for not getting there before me.
vivid relic
All I got was old old posts where they were emitting those errors from physics, particles etc
But I guess I could have reasoned my way to it
oh, I see now. I left out "ECS". Shame on me indeed
old atlas
Is there any way to run the animators after the entity-gameObject synchronization?
By default, if I have a gameObject with game object entity component, a IComponentData wrapped with ComponentDataWrapper and an animator, I can create an animation curve using Unity's built-in animation window and run it thanks to the animator component.
However, the value that the animator sets every frame gets overriden by the value that the entity currently stores, and so the animation curve has no effect.
If one disables the game object entity component, the animation runs as expected.
My first idea has been to take a look into the PlayerLoop api and try to run the animator after the ecs systems, but no luck so far. Any ideas?
urban rivet
You should absorb the ECS forum, there's weeks of data there, followed by the updated samples from github (fixed for api changes)
tawdry tree
Hoo? When were the samples updated?
old atlas
They get updated quite often, last update seems like it was a month ago
tawdry tree
Hmm, maybe I just stumbled on an outdated version or just got unlucky with some of those I looked up, then
green lynx
anyone had any luck with modifying vertices on a rendermesh component? My mesh kinda just... disappears
tawdry tree
That sounds odd, like it loses reference to the mesh(which should nullref) or maybe it just can't make sense of it. I remember that when procedurally making meshes I had to make sure to set/update both vertices and triangles (and normals, but messing up those just made weird lighting).
manic aurora
make sure your tris are oriented correctly too, or they're invisible. im still using MeshInstanceRenderer in my project that works with meshes, but manipulating the mesh directly without reassigning MeshInstanceRenderer .mesh works fine
rugged wagon
@untold night Thanks a bunch, these are some great resources!
gusty comet
Hi guys, someone know how to properly delete/reset a world? or maybe just the entity manager. Because I tried to dispose the world or delete the manager but Unity crash whitout even the error display ^^
light sage
Migrated my 2d sprite based project with ~200 GameObjects over to close to pure ECS using quads and unlit/cutout materials. Two days of scanning the limited API (apparently most of the examples are gone), and had a hard time until I figured out the meshinstancerenderer is now rendermesh, and those kind of changes that aren't documented anywhere that I could find. But, with il2cpp working thanks to an xml file linker I found to prevent stripping, I'm now getting a stable and beautiful 120+ frames/sec. Once you start to pick up on ECS from an OOP trained mindset, it's hard to go back. There are still hundred of ways to optimize my build, and I don't even need them. @gusty comet an EntityManager can make batch calls to destroy, there are a few examples of scene swapping still on the Github API.
@gusty comet This is what I'm refering too
var instances = new NativeArray<Entity>(500, Allocator.Temp);
EntityManager.Instantiate(entity, instances);
// Destroy all 500 entities
EntityManager.DestroyEntity(instances);```Way to learn that I find the quickest is just look at all the properties/methods/structs while messing around in Visual Studios. They are mostly named quite self-explanatory, and when you find one that sounds interesting open up google and learn learn learn
gusty comet
@light sage Yeah thanks I know ^^ I was just wondering how I could delete the whole active world and set a new one.
Btw I'm going to dig a bit into Buffers, could they be the answer to array linked to entities?
light sage
I 'm actually digging more into chunk iteration and buffers today myself also.
interesting questions really
since World is an object, wondering if maybe possible to copy default world and use the copy to populate, the default being more of an archetype (lightweight so you can keep it around to reset). That or JIT to compile on demand at reset, haden't gone down that thought pathway before bc not really applicable to my game, but the concepts are actually thought provoking in terms of future implementation
gusty comet
I guess I could also have a native array inside a system and inject this one
I wonder how I could choose between those solution
light sage
Injection getting reworked , but the way I would think is starting with the template and just dropping the extra at reset would be more efficient for multiple resets
unless there are persistent changes you want carried over on resent, then I think your method
@gusty comet Are you doing pure ECS? Do you know a good method to hook a reference to the main camera's transform's position property into an Icomponent, entity, etc? or if there is a good not so hacky way to control the main camera's position inside the pure system? (right now I am just updating in the updata() of the bootstrapping monobehavior. It's working, but I would like to be able to manage internally, outside of the systems monobehavior kickstart class with native ECS methods?
prefab it, and grab it that way through gameobject entity?
gusty comet
@light sage I still use some gameobject for the camera and the colliders, but you can do it like the rendering system and directly save UnityEngine.Camera.main inside your custom system and then just get your component groups.
light sage
true, I just didn't want to worry about synchronization issues later
gusty comet
that's why I stayed safe (especially to switching camera) and still use gameobjectentity to synchronize the gameobject camera to my camera entity
light sage
that a good scalable plan
just annoying because I would rather avoid the Update method entirely, and my camera moves at the same velocity as my playerentity, although I do need to have access to it outside of the system at the same time
gusty comet
well you can simply make your own camera system like I said earlier, can be really quick depending of the features you need
light sage
did that for input, made it very low level
just when I think I understand ECS it's another revelation
gusty comet
things are pretty natural for me so it's hard to tell ^^
Btw this one is more about the memory layout that unity use than ECS
light sage
I started 2 days agao >_<
gusty comet
I work with that mindset since... sometime x)
light sage
started c# 2 weeks ago, but it's a java clone so same thing
ECS reminds me of when I worked with JCL (job control language)
gusty comet
c# is really annoying though, give me back my C++ π’
light sage
or java control language, I g\forget
but working with spooler and all that
IBM mainframes
since I had to install the cpp libs to compile to il2cpp it gives me a good time to write some plugins
gusty comet
I'm working a bit too much for this right now :/
tawdry tree
Ooh, a lot of people would get mad at you calling C# a java clone. Same general style though, they're both mid-level C family languages
And I would say C++ is a lot more annoying than C#. Then again I haven't worked much with C++, and not getting used to things makes it more bothersome to do, and I did it in school, so follow ALL the conventions. Header file for a class with one method! Header file for class with TWO methods! Oh, and did you fuck up memory again?
having low-level control is nice and all, but most of the time I don't care and just want my code to work.
light sage
they can retort with the fact that one of Javas first design implementations was to create a streamlined way to program VCR chips
true, I want low level where there are clear bottle necks though
like having a need to constantly check for input flags even though it's a 90% waste, and especially doing so on main thread
that kind of stuff screams for a more efficient solution
but given the choose between embedded ifs or less efficient code, I'd take the slightly less efficient, more elegant readable
at compile time, depending on compilation method, it's all mostly negligible anyway
gusty comet
hum someone know if the transform system does support serialization? I mean how does it know that I just loaded a bunch of entities that are parents/childs (because the entity reference serialization is managed)
tawdry tree
I don't think it is serialized by default, but the datatypes definitely are, so you should be able to trick your serializer of choice to include it
gusty comet
? Entities references are serialized
they just recompute their new value when load the world
tawdry tree
Actually, rereading your comment, you're speaking about transform relationships, now locRotScale
gusty comet
just the transform system which does have a map of the relationship between parents and childs
I'm wondering how does it behave when you serialize/deserialize the world
tawdry tree
I can't help you there, but it shouldn't be too hard to test?
gusty comet
I'm afraid it's just not supported because the Add only appear in the attach function. But I'm going to test it yeah ^^
gusty comet
Okay I said nothing, transform system update itself if the hierarchy changed even whitout the event, and the nativehashmap can even extend is capacity. Good enough for me ^^
gusty comet
Still I'm not sure how it does trigger attach chunks :/
dull copper
oh
new entities and hybrid rendering packages out now
EntityDebugger and Entity inspector API are no longer public
wonder why they did that, sounds like that would seriously limit custom inspectors
gusty comet
In fact the transform system doesn't update itself... I just did serialize the entity event by error xD
coarse turtle
There's actually a p24 bug related to the CopyTransformFromGameObjectSystem: https://forum.unity.com/threads/p24-dependency-bug-i-recommend-not-upgrading.631450/
tertle provided a work around soln to the thread
lilac ermine
but you can do it like the rendering system and directly save UnityEngine.Camera.main inside your custom system @gusty comet the rendering system uses Camera.main? π€
i'm surprised unity still even let's you do this, and without throwing warnings like "hey did you know you've probably been unknowingly abusing this for years?"
the first time i learned it does FindGameObjectsWithTag every time you call it was from some random unite video and my jaw nearly hit the floor
full stirrup
I figured that out from the simple Camera.main property, it flops if there isnt a camera with the MainCamera tag so you kind of put the pieces together
Pay some mind to the easy access properties for anything like that happening
light sage
In this clip you can see I'm using quads for tiles and just pure ecs, and everything is very efficient (40,000 quads in the video clip example), but I have an issue finding a way to get the "ship" entity's position into the class and job that deals with calculating adding/removing/repositioning quads along the edges dynamically (quad fits in a 1x1 Unit, ship position x/y increases by 1 a new row/col of quads to transform). What is the best way to get the ship position (which is set to a float3 "pos" in ships componentdata) to the other system without ghosting the ship, etc?
since the camera is already ghosting, I would like to be able to just grab the coords directly from inside the system, with no other overhead. I have other plans for the camera also, which make that a bad route
light sage
Would bringing the ship in with the tiles through a mutual float3 data type, updating that data type to match the ship's position, and using a separate job just to bring all those tiles back with a different filter and use that float3 for the transform? Ugh, feel like I'm missing something simple
had no success with getcomponentdatafromentity or those methods, they never seem to work, I guess I'm just implementing them wrong
tawdry tree
Well, I assume you already have a way to find the player ship, so can't you just, in your system, grab that, and use the ship's position as an argument to the system?
lilac ermine
were most of the examples removed from the sample project? or we're supposed to find them elsewhere?
tawdry tree
They drastically stripped down the amount of samples, yeah. Prolly cus some of them got a bit outdated, or used patterns they decided weren't so good
lilac ermine
are there any good examples of dealing with ui? also curious how people do more reactive / OnPropertyChanged style
for example, i do a lot of like this in my own little ecs framework (i'm transitioning some smaller stuff to unity's)
healthComponent.CurrentHealth.DistinctUntilChanged ().Where (value => value <= 0).Subscribe (_ =>
{
animator.SetTrigger ("Die");
});
this might be like a reactive DeathAnimationSystem
using UniRx for reactive properties
animatedButtons.OnAdd().Subscribe(entity =>
{
var button = entity.GetComponent<Button>();
var animator = entity.GetComponent<Animator>();
button.OnPointerDownAsObservable().Subscribe(_ =>
{
animator.SetInteger("State", 1);
});
})
this could be an AnimatedButtonSystem
i'm already thinking how to do the OnAdd stuff for the group according to the brief bit joachim discussed this at one of the unite's, using SystemStateComponentData for reactive systems (unless they've added something else recently i've missed that allows a nicer built in way of doing this)
it's the reactiveProperty.UntilChanged() and myClickable.OnPointerClickAsObservable() type of stuff i'm still really missing though
tawdry tree
So while(not changed) and on mouse clicked something something as observable? Without the context for those method names I don't know what they actually do
lilac ermine
yeah sorry i'm trying not to flood the channel with code but still be communicating clearly
tawdry tree
Could always make a pastebin or something to put your code online and shar eit with a link instead of actually writing it all here.
I think some services let you edit them later, too
lilac ermine
health component would look something like this (it's all based on https://github.com/neuecc/UniRx)
public class HealthComponent
{
public int StartingHealth;
public IntReactiveProperty CurrentHealth;
}
I take it you are specifying a bit more which specific features you need? (if not, please do)
lilac ermine
my systems are then almost all reactive and mostly do some processing or setup when entities are added
for example healthComponent.CurrentHealth.DistinctUntilChanged ().Where (value => value <= 0).Subscribe would then just respond to when it changes and is less than 0
the specific feature i need here is in my update loop i just want to be processing entities that meet some query
in this example it would be give me all the health components where the value has just changed to less than or equal to 0
tawdry tree
So you're the Observer pattern to activate systems when entities change? That doesn't sound very ECS...
In that specific example, it sounds to me like the 'proper' ECS way to do it is to get all entities with Health, without DeathTag
Then to do death stuff and add the tag.
Possibly swapping the DeathTag with a blittable bool/state variable in health to see if change has been processed
lilac ermine
ehh i was hoping to avoid like this. i'm pretty sure i saw some way of doing this with queries but i can't find it now
it's very ecs, with observables we can still split data and logic π
tawdry tree
You could also just make a Reactive component with a bool/state 'changed'.
So stuff would (usually) have Health and Reactive, and you'd query for both, then filter out everything where Reactive.changed is false. In that case I'd have a system running after everything else to set all changed bools back to false (so that all systems using it would run, not just the first
lilac ermine
we're just not thinking in a polling / update mindset
hmm, that could work too π€
i was hoping this was something i could nicely do with queries though
but most of the examples + tutorials i was seeing for those were outdated some time ago
tawdry tree
Well, it would use queries, just not the way you originally envisioned?
It should be mentioned that, having not really worked much with ECS, I'm a bit of an armchair theorist here.
I think queries are one of the things that have changed quite a lot, and I might have read somewhere that they are being dropped? At least in their current form? It might have referred to something else or already have happened, too.
...I really should wring my brain for an idea I find sufficient to actually bother sitting down and putting in more than a token effort in learning Unity ECS...
Only thing I've made is this beginning of what should've become a boid simulation, with the most literal examples of corner cases I've ever had in my code.
I did consider getting a nice shot of that and posting to r/ProgrammerHumor tho
lilac ermine
yeah i dove in pretty hard for a couple of weeks but there was a lot of old stuff and new stuff i never quite sussed out. the Filter bits i think were removed but chunk iteration via archetype queries is very much part of the core
tawdry tree
Oh yeah, archetype queries and chunk iteration is quite core, I meant queries in the LINQ kinda query meaning
Wait, can you append where statements to those queries?
lilac ermine
Β―_(γ)_/Β―
i remember something like 'only getting the entities whose componentdata has changed' but maybe i dreamt it
tawdry tree
That sounds vaguely familiar, something about chunks changing...
lilac ermine
well, i'm also very interested in any good up-to-date ui examples out there
my instinct is to create wrappers (proxies...) now that fire off ECS style events for other systems to consume
tawdry tree
Hybrid UI elements, where the UI events would create UIEvent (ButtonClicked, ButtonHover, etc) entities, which would in turn be used by systems?
For now I think you shouldn't be too picky in that particular department, as changes will probably soon give you a 'proper' way to do it or just break your existing code if you make it too complex/clever
lilac ermine
basically yeah. monobehaviours that create entities as events. quick and dirty and like you said it's probably going to be seeing some changes in the near term anyway
tawdry tree
Could even use actual events for extra dirty, but I'm not sure how good of an idea it is to have Systems listen for events
light sage
honestly I'm just hacking at it, I was just adding more component data and a new system anytime I needed to enterface with the ship in a new way, or add a feature
without an api, and verything in flux, it's a confusing time to learn
tawdry tree
Well, if you learn the principles, that's valuable in itself. And if you just check the changelog when things change, you should eventually get an understanding not of how things are in the moment, but what major changes has been made over time.
light sage
{
[BurstCompile]
struct ShipMovementSystem : IJobProcessComponentDataWithEntity<ShipData, Position>
{
[ReadOnly] public float dT;
public void Execute(Entity Player, int index, ref ShipData data, ref Position pos) {
pos.Value += new float3((data.velocityX)*dT, (data.velocityY)*dT, 0);
}
}
protected override JobHandle OnUpdate(JobHandle inputDependencies)
{
var job = new ShipMovementSystem()
{
dT = Time.fixedDeltaTime
};
return job.Schedule(this, inputDependencies);
}
}```this I use to manage the ships acceleration, but even it's redundant and the "with entity" unnecessary
tawdry tree
Add csharp after the first triple backticks (and a newline, if you don't have one) to get code highlighting. Also consider replacing tabs with two spaces for more discord-friendly indentation.
light sage
I guess a basic question then. Should I keep most of my classes in different files? Right now I have a file for each class and one for each entity archetype
or is it irrelevant on compilation?
I love and support ECS, this black box scenario atm is just really frustrating
tawdry tree
In general it's considered good practice to separate types into separate files, but in the end it's a style choice.
With ECS there are a lot of types involved, though, and I would for example put the hybrid wrapper class in the same file as the ECS component struct
Unless you made assembly definition files, i don't think the compiler cares.
light sage
that's what I have right now, archetype declarations in the bootstrap/monobehavior, and everything else seperate. I guess I'll just pick up what I can, and when the reposiory get's fixed I can make changes
tawdry tree
That sounds like a reasonable setup. And it's not like it's hard to extract a class/struct to its own file. While watching a video it struck me that in some cases it might be useful to have one file with a bunch of related archetypes. Like for different NPC types or something.
light sage
yea, like items, or ship types, that's smart, I just want it clean and organized for when I comment it out in case of collab/ etcetera
I just know that if things aren't put together that get called in batches, and burst compiled, and if they are bringing in a bunch of unrelated stuff with them it kindaof defeats the purpose
plus I'm pedantic about not using the main thread at all, since I can't inject
leave room for GUI
tawdry tree
The batches are based on chunks, which are determined by the components on entities, I think? The key part there is to have like stuff be actually like, and not have different components if you can help it.
As for optimization, someone else wrote something nice, along the lines of "I'm not too worried about optimization for now, since things change so much. I can optimize later when the effects of each system is more clear."
Aka the first rule of optimization: Don't optimize.
2nd: If you need to optimize, profile first.
3rd: When you optimize, do it where you get the greatest effect.
light sage
I'm profiling, and I hvae a stead 60 fps fixed and 120+ fps unstable, CPU halfway to bottlenockeing due to endframe and rendering. My philosophy is build the strongest and most efficient foundation possible, that way it's scalable and will give an idea of where the game can go limitation-wise
bottom up approach, I used to use a top down, and my programs would always end up hard to maintain at some point
tawdry tree
Making a strong foundation is great and all, but at some point you just end up spending a whole lot of effort that would ultimately not have much effect. It's a tradeoff, I suppose.
light sage
on native il2cpp build it's incredibly solid, it's just the syntax, I'm at a roadblock with how to do what I need to do using ECS
I understand what you mean though, I just stuck an entity to ghost the player to get the positional data and dropped a comment to fix it when I know how
tawdry tree
The player moves via a system, right? Where you need their position, do whatever you do to grab their position and stuff there, then input that into a job or whatever in is required for. Something roughly like
JobHandle Onupdate(object IDontRememberWhatGoesHere){
var playerpos = entitymanager.GetPlayerSomeHow().Position;
var actualJob = ActualJobThatNeedsPlayerPos(playerPos);
actualjob.Schedule();
}
This video shows my problem, I'm having really good performance with ECS, but when I reach the bounds of the tiles, I can't figure out how to best keep replacing them, and also how to get the universal coords back to 0,0,0 without any hitches when the floats get too large. All this I know how to do with OOP easily, it's just that I can't progress until I go through example after example ignoring the fact that all the examples online (98%) use inject consistently
tawdry tree
Hmm, if you have issues with floats not being large enough, go for doubles or split things into sectors. Ie, first (arbitrary large, but not too large) units is sector one, then the position float starts over from 0 while the sector increases.
light sage
considering something along the lines of a transition with visual effects
tawdry tree
Or look up how other people have solved floating point issues, i know Kerbal Space Program have some solution to it, and the game is big enough that I reckon they've stated how they do it somewhere
light sage
KSP I don't knwo how it was made, it's a marvel
but eh, I could map the tiles to a sphere, or reset an menu screens, lots of options, just the syntax
tawdry tree
Oof, you would wanna jobify and/or ECS that one, but yeah, one way to do it. Possibly THE way to do it (not necessarily that specific script, but in general)
light sage
yea, that one would be too much overhead, but interesting concept
I just hope that ECS doesn't get stuck underneath the framework where we can't access it directly anym,ore so that I'm not wasting my time learning it
lime dome
HDRP natively supports Camera-Relative rendering now, so the problem with models looking odd is eliminated.
but the physics issue would still be a factor
light sage
not much collision intended
so worth looking into
might just zone things and rotate all the quads inside the frustrum and drop the rendering amount beforehand
tawdry tree
Well, ECS is still in experimental/preview, and while you could make something production-ready, it's explicitly not supported, and in massive flux. Chances are some form of ECS will stay with unity for the foreseeable future, though.
dull copper
afaik, KSP used floats in local sims and doubles in larger scale
making custom physics integrator isn't hard, doing everything else around it on physics engine is harder (but you don't really need collisions for everything)
light sage
Squad proabbably had a whole team devoted to C++ or other lowlevel plugins I would imagine
dull copper
you can do their scope sims on pure c# just fine
in fact, I think they have their physics stuff publicly available somewhere
light sage
I try not to actually simulate where I don't have to, life for acceleration, and velocity, I'm not grabbing square roots every loop
I know they have an api, I have it on steam, I could look, I more need to know how to do inject without inject though, lol
tawdry tree
but... but... that's exactly what inject is for, why can't you use that?
light sage
deprecation incoming https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples/blob/master/Documentation~/injection.md
dull copper
"Download the beta build required here" π
those docs could benefit for a full check now
light sage
I have 2019 beta, I'm going to try doing what I need with IJobChunk
dull copper
also the injection page links for ForEach goes somewhere else
light sage
yea, that repo is screwed up
dull copper
afaik, 2018.3 is still fine for ECS but new ECS renderer will require 2019.1
mainly missing things from engine API side on 2018.3 for that
tawdry tree
Oh yeah, the way to do things now is to use the object initializer, isn't it
var jobStruct = new SomethingJob(){
VariableToSet1 = something,
VariableToSet2 = somethingElse
};
I think all ways are strange right now, due to it changing so much and documentation being, uh, of variable usefulness
coarse turtle
Yea, most information I get from the forums lol
light sage
[BurstCompile]
[RequireComponentTag(typeof(BackgroundData))]
public struct SetQuad : IJobChunk
{
public ArchetypeChunkComponentType<Position> Pos;
public void Execute(ArchetypeChunk tileChunk, int chunkSize)
{
var chunkPos = tileChunk.GetNativeArray(Pos);
var howManyPos = tileChunk.Count;
for (int e = 0; e < howManyPos; e++)
{
}
}
}```well, they added a new required param to the Execute method for ArchetypeChunkComponent, but once I find it I think this should do ok
besides the fact we can't have nativearrays as components
tawdry tree
Need a newline after the csharp part
light sage
since typeof is slow, I could just grab all the tiles to this system with a throwaway tag and strip that tag once I have them I guess
move them to persistent nativearrays
tawdry tree
As long as you don't repeatedly add and/or remove the components, that should be fine, but it might be better to just have an AddedToCollection variable you set to true?
light sage
I mean, I could filter them without that "I think"
never sure without a decent api lol
tawdry tree
Try and see if it works? At this point I'm pretty sure just trying whatever to see if it works is the proper way to handle things
light sage
unity crashes restart and try again lol
soon as I find this new int param
assuming its either the size (32 - 128) or the instances wanted?
tawdry tree
What's the context?
light sage
I'm rewriting the whole code, probably tore down 400 line so far, I'm understanding better (sortof)
only way to learn it right now is through an IDE
manic aurora
is BufferArray being deprecated along with ComponentDataArray? for certain workloads that would actually completely eliminate my ability to parallelize buffer writes on a per-entity basis, since there is no IJobProcessBufferData
untold night
I believe there is a BufferFromEntity<T> lookup, and chunks can get you a BufferAccessor<T> that you can access in IJobChunk
manic aurora
hah i had one of those - "it works!"... "it doesn't work!" ... "it works!!!" moments with that. BufferFromEntity was great once i figured it out π
lilac ermine
suuuuuper brain block atm: what are some reasons a component system doesn't run?
i have a very basic system i am trying to change over from my own ecs framework to unity's - i thought i was pretty comfortable with their system at this point but i guess not
i've tested the code and setup in a fresh project and it works fine
and i can see my system showing up in the entity debugger as if it should be updating (in the existing older project)
but when i Debug.Log in OnUpdate() it seems to never actually be called
manic aurora
does it get called if you use [AlwaysUpdateSystem]? is it in the default world, or a world you've otherwise configured to update with ScriptBehaviourUpdateOrder? and iirc systems won't run if the component groups you inject all have length zero, but i don't know if i've seen that being true in practice...
lilac ermine
default world and should not be zero
at the moment i am testing a gameobject with: GameObjectEntity, Animator, and Button
this is the system
using Unity.Entities;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.UI;
public class AnimatedButtonComponentSystem : ComponentSystem
{
ComponentGroup animatedButtons;
protected override void OnCreateManager()
{
base.OnCreateManager();
var query = new EntityArchetypeQuery
{
All = new ComponentType[] { typeof(Animator), typeof(Button) }
};
animatedButtons = GetComponentGroup(query);
}
protected override void OnUpdate()
{
Debug.Log("running with " + animatedButtons.CalculateLength() + " animated buttons");
}
}
i am a little foggy on handling hybrid stuff, but i'm willing to bet that entity archetype query doesn't know what to do with the unity engine components (which are not "components types" like it expects, i.e. ones that fulfill the IComponentData interface)
manic aurora
oh interesting...
lilac ermine
i can see the entities like this in the debugger in both projects
hmm, i have some ideas, but it's mostly a game at this point of "spot the difference"
yeah it's one of these plugins silently conflicting π€
hmm, yeah, for some reason having UniRx in the project causes this behaviour
lilac ermine
light sage
I couldn't put my project back together, I got carried away making huge alterations, lol
trying to hook into the main camera, meshes and textures, and then delete the bootstrap gameobject so it's just the camera,
gusty comet
Hi guys, I just updated my project entities package and got a some errors on the transform system :
Library\PackageCache\com.unity.entities@0.0.12-preview.24\Unity.Transforms.Editor\TransformComponentEditors.cs(41,26): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'PositionProxy' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
Anyone have a clue of what I missed?
light sage
I've noticed a few few things seemed not to work like they did before, but I thought it was just me
I'm comparing cpu usage between using two worlds, one for simulating and one dedicated to rendering, so it's further refining the logic then render loop
public World sys = new World("sys");
var job = new BGenJob()
{
sys = Unity.Entities.World.Active,'
other variables = whatever}```nice feature to experiment with
eh, that's redundant though, just setting it back to active lol nvm
WorldDiffer looks interesting, can't find any documentation at all
light sage
DiffUtil.GetAllChunks(EntityManager m_entityManger)```if that works the way it sounds that the most useful bit of code I've found yet
or are their differed chunks of entities not visible in the debugger used to render?
light sage
Yea, I'm finally finding the fun apis. So Unity will autoupdate, and nerf a lot of these loopholes to the lower level hidden functionality, right?
elder wharf
@gusty comet delete your library folder (or package cache first), I had the same problem (and also these guys: https://forum.unity.com/threads/preview-24-the-type-or-namespace-name-positionproxy-could-not-be-found.631786/)
gusty comet
@elder wharf Oups I deleted the wrong message, yeah I did delete it that's fine now ^^ thanks
gusty comet
Can someone explain me ArchetypeQuery? can't find what Any,None and All mean exactly π¦
knotty radish
gusty comet
or maybe I should have read the code...
knotty radish
"All = All components in the array must exist in the Archetype
Any = Any of the components in the array must exist in the Archetype (at least one)
None = None of the components in the array can exist in the Archetype"
gusty comet
Yeah thanks I don't know why I asked that xD
knotty radish
It's not always the first thing I think about when I'm wondering about something in ECS but sometimes this wiki does have the answer
gusty comet
Yeah just didn't read the right page, but I could have simply looked at that :
/// <summary>
/// Define a query to find archetypes with specific component(s).
/// Any - Gets archetypes that have one or more of the given components
/// None - Gets archetypes that do not have the given components
/// All - Gets archetypes that have all the given components
/// Example:
/// Player has components: Position, Rotation, Player
/// Enemy1 has components: Position, Rotation, Melee
/// Enemy2 has components: Position, Rotation, Ranger
/// The query below would give you all of the archetypes that:
/// have any of [Melee or Ranger], AND have none of [Player], AND have all of [Position and Rotation]
/// new EntityArchetypeQuery {
/// Any = new ComponentType[] {typeof(Melee), typeof(Ranger)},
/// None = new ComponentType[] {typeof(Player)},
/// All = new ComponentType[] {typeof(Position), typeof(Rotation)} }
/// </summary>
public class EntityArchetypeQuery
Btw is there some utilities to serialize Native Containers?
knotty radish
Not sure, I don't think it exists yet
But they are working on editor tools for ECS so I guess that during the GDC something will come out or be announced (well UTiny editor tools were already announced for C# ECS but no ETA at this point)
muted flare
hey hey guys ! anyone knows when LA megacity samples will be avaiable ? or maybe they are already somewhere ?
untold night
I think they said megacity would possibly be as soon as gdc
muted flare
hahaa π so noone knows =). I was curious how the code looks like with this new invention called IJobProcessComponentDataWithEntity
knotty radish
Well they need the scene streaming feature if I'm not wrong so whenever that is out, Megacity will follow
full stirrup
think theres samples of IJobProcessComponentDataWithEntity
dull copper
I don't think there was any official statement on MegaCity release other than during 2019
but it's probably going to get out sooner than later (I'd guess if not on GDC then on next Unite late this spring)
urban rivet
I'm curious about how this will solve open world rendering. In megacity they're not using hierarchical lod are they?
it's just brute forced
gusty comet
public static void WriteArray<T>(this BinaryWriter writer, NativeArray<T> data) where T: struct
{
writer.WriteBytes(data.GetUnsafeReadOnlyPtr(), data.Length * UnsafeUtility.SizeOf<T>());
}
It was there π Still need to update Entity reference
@urban rivet they are. Using HLOD because they have part of buildings that they want to switch LODs with the same worldreference
tawdry tree
Pretty sure they made (procGenned?) different levels of actual detail, from plain stretched cubes, then adding on slightly larger details, all the way to the finest details (like AC units). Relevant 45min talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=758hd52A_RE
There's also they keynote, which is 12min long but not as technical, more a showcase. There are some technical tidbits, but more at the concept/pattern level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4rWfPyf-hk
dull copper
crossposting a bit: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/pull/3043
HDRP got DOTS instancing on github now
toxic walrus
wait... DOTS is already available?
toxic walrus
ah, i thought it was their visual scripting coming for ECS
lime dome
yeah DOTS = visual scripting was my understanding too
so if it's not, then what is the Visual Scripting called? DIPPIN? π
untold night
speaking of instancing and DOTS, is that PR just for HDRP or will it work for LWRP as well? I'm kinda stalled on something because the only sane performance alternative right now is creating a bunch of prefabs in all possible configurations, whereas with instancing the code would be much simpler for a data view UI i'm working on
urban rivet
Huh, DOTS instancing is a strange call, I guess I thought it would be automatic
what is different between DOTS instancing and DMII ?
I figured the shader part would be consistent between them even if submission wasn't
untold night
at the moment there's no real support for material property blocks, so even if you want to, say, make your own bespoke sprite atlas system, you're up a creek without a paddle.
My current work around is different prefabs with different RenderMesh components per material input combination, but that doesn't scale in the slightest.
whereas if we had material property block / instancing support, it would be a cakewalk and all the input data I'm trying to diagnose would batch under a single material object
for perspective, I'm trying to diagnose the output of my input buffer by making one of those fighting game UIs that show the individual moves you inputted
dull copper
@urban rivet I'd guess it's all tied in with this Added new batched renderer for MegaCity sample (Requires API in 19.1 and is disabled by default)
light sage
code was working last night, I changed it a bit, and ran it this morning, now I'm getting batch jobs only can be run on main thread errors, even when I try to revert the code, was there a change or am I just not remembering how I had is coded?
batching seems faster on the main thread also
dull copper
@lime dome and yeah, can confirm: DOTS != the visual scripting thing (although new VS will be under DOTS), it's umbrella term for these things like recursive mentioned (Unity started using it only recently)
urban rivet
That's for subscenes
light sage
why are for loops not working in my jobs today...
storm ravine
@fringe dew you should ask them better, be kind with them π€
light sage
was rhetorical, it's what I get for putting a bunch of code I don't fully understand in my project
I should divide this system up anyway, it was serving too many purposes
solar ridge
Data Oriented Tech Stack for those wondering what it stands for. It just a tech stack and not any one thing
gusty comet
Okay I'm completely lost with that one. What does activate this option mean?
light sage
do the volatile attribute and ecs/burst conflict? also, how does stackalloc tie-in?
gusty comet
What's the preferred method of iterating pure entities and changing data in their components in a regular ComponentSystem(not JobComponentSystem)?
dull copper
gusty comet
But I can't use IComponentData in ForEach parameters, it doesn't compile. @dull copper
Hmm, actually it has a generic overload that mentions IComponentData in the source.
Okay, nvm. I just had to also take entity as an arg in the lambda. Wooo.
gusty comet
Yes, I didn't mention that but it was.
light sage
1,000,000 entities (quads, with sprite textures) covering, each 1 unit^2 in size ran in editor at a sketchy but playable 40+ fps lol, new benchmark
tawdry tree
How many systems were running, and how complex are they?
light sage
I can drop it on codepile or something
just three systems, a lot of it was due to occlusion settings I think
(when I switch to scene view it quickly locks up (after 3ish seconds), but otherwise it's good. My specs aren't great either
tawdry tree
Well, my point was more that entities in themselves shouldn't drop that much FPS unless you have GPU intensive stuff on them (and single, presumably render-instanced quads are not), so I was wondering if it's in a more complete environment with several systems of varying complexity or more like a 'how many entities can I spawn' test
Sounds like the answer in the format I was looking for is not many, and not particularly complex
light sage
no, it was simple, but 1,00,000 was just pretty ispiring, quads > sprite, with no ecs and sprite I couldn't lods more than 60,000 tiles without threadlock
I'll just pm if that's cool, show you a few snippets
looking for a second opinion on something, I have everything very commented out
tawdry tree
Sure, and I think you dropped a 0 in that million
light sage
HodHandr is extremely generous with his time, I feel like I solidified my csharp and ecs knowledge tenfold, just publically announcing his helpfulness, no better way to thank you right now
light sage
Data.right = (int)(pos.Value.x);
Data.left = - Data.right;
Data.up = (int)(pos.Value.y);
Data.down = - Data.up;
if (Data.right > ZERO)
{
Data.off_Loops_Right += ONE;
Data.off_Loops_Left = ZERO;
}
else if(-Data.left < ZERO)
{
Data.off_Loops_Left -= ONE;
Data.off_Loops_Right = ZERO;
}
if (Data.up > ZERO)
{
Data.off_Loops_Up += ONE;
Data.off_Loops_Down = ZERO;
}
else if (-Data.down < ZERO)
{
Data.off_Loops_Down -= ONE;
Data.off_Loops_Up = ZERO;
}
}```
XY vector specific, background loop based, inverse delta time
job performance logging, lightweight interger component thingamagig
**EDIT--fixed, after taking the modulus and absolute value stuff out, the solution sseemed a little counter intuitive at firstBut could it be useful, hopefully I can find out before I decide it's causing overhead and evict it
hexed pumice
Hi, With Unity 2019.1.0a10 I got this error Library\PackageCache\com.unity.jobs@0.0.7-preview.6\Editor\JobsMenu.cs(43,60): error CS0117: 'NativeLeakDetectionMode' does not contain a definition for 'EnabledWithStackTrace' Do I need to revert to Unity 2018 ?
dull copper
if you want 2019.2, sure π
a4 is bit old, 2019.1 has been getting few updates more
but 2019.2.0a6 will release next week at least (a5 was skipped)
urban rivet
I am a slut for latest alphas but sometimes the alpha takes you to a place you regret
b4 atm
hexed pumice
Cool... Fresh install of 2019.2.0a4 and the latest boid sample will crash the editor on loading the scene.... π© The other samples work...Will I need to go back to b4.
light sage
I never used inject because I started ECS only recently and read the deprecation notice, but why is it being depricated? inefficiency or unsafeness? or just a stylistic choice?
tawdry tree
Pretty sure you still have some form of injection (like in jobs...?), they're just deprecating the [Inject] decorator? Haven't really read much about that particular feature, but injection has a bit of overhead
light sage
that makes sense , ECS is a closed loop without it, I guess it kinda throws a small halt bottlenecking a bit at the barrier like that
makes sense then why they say use the buffer now
thick carbon
because [Inject] was a pretty big code smell
hard to see what's going on if you don't know exactly what the Inject attribute does
urban rivet
chunk replace need for inject
gusty comet
I have exactly 4 meshes that will persist for all of the game level. What's the best way to get them into a ComponentSystem and manipulate the shader properties every frame? I read all relevant Unity forum threads about it and I'm still not clear on how to do that except for forking the instanced renderer system and performing dark magic on material blocks.
I'll also need to spawn hundrends of differently colored instanced blocks so I need to set material properties for that as well.
tawdry tree
So when rendering stuff you have both a material and mesh in the RenderMesh component. The material should be set to instancing on for performance. The RenderMesh component should be a shared component for everything with the same settings (so one shared between all yellow, one between all red, etc.)
Not entirely sure what the best way to keep track of the various instances are, though. Maybe spawning entities with no position and a component, something like
struct RenderMeshStorage : Component {
public int Identifier; //Could be team, faction, whatever.
}
RenderMeshStorageArchetype : Archetype {
RenderMeshStorage,
SharedComponent(Rendermesh)
}
@tawdry tree what you suggest, does that work only for properties you set once? I need to update a property every frame.
tawdry tree
Uh, if the update is supposed to update EVERYTHING using that same color to a new color, maybe. if everything needs to be able to change material info separately, you might lose out on instanced rendering, but either way using shared components would probably be bad, as whenever a value changed the entity would need to switch chunk, if i understand correctly.
That said, I haven't played around with that, and it depends on what you need to do. Why does the material's settings need to be able to change every update? What are you trying to accomplish?
gusty comet
@tawdry tree well it's going to be a rhythm game. I have the track buttons press animation controlled by a shader property of press progress of [0,1].
I'll also need to light up note blocks that are being correctly held. That means changin the shader's glow float.
tawdry tree
Hmm, in this case I think the 'proper' way to do it is to bake the color into the shader, but that'd require shader work.
Not to mess around with the material itself
gusty comet
The color is not the issue. I need to set the float for press progress.
tawdry tree
Oh, i have no idea how to send values into shaders, ask in #archived-shaders maybe?
gusty comet
And a bool for the block shaders.
I know how.
It's just that instanced renderer ECS system ignores material properties.
And material blocks are classes, not structs.
tawdry tree
That sounds odd, but unfortunately I can't help you, sounds like you'll need someone with more nitty-gritty experience
soft nova
@gusty comet https://forum.unity.com/threads/materialpropertyblock-support-in-meshinstancerenderersystem.562369/
gusty comet
Yes, I've seen this.
I've explicitly mentioned that I don't want to fork the current rendering component system.
soft nova
Well you didn't say you don't want to fork it, but is either that or you re set the Shared component every frame with a modified material, which will be way slower since those will be constantly moving between chunks.
gusty comet
I guess I'll just sync the properties back to the regular renderer with a component mono since all of this is non jobified anyway Β―_(γ)_/Β―
Any idea why this doesn't add components at all? cs protected override void OnCreateManager() { ForEach((Entity entity, ButtonComponent button) => { EntityManager.AddComponentData(entity, new TrackIndex { Value = button.Index }); EntityManager.AddComponentData(entity, new TrackInput()); }); }
tawdry tree
What exactly is that supposed to iterate over? If you put a breakpoint, I believe you will find that it never enters the loop?
gusty comet
You mean the world's entity list isn't formed until all managers are created?
The entity with a ButtonComponent is in the scene from the start. @tawdry tree
tawdry tree
Try setting a breakpoint and see what happens
gusty comet
I understand that it doesn't run, I'm asking why.
tawdry tree
Because it has nothing to iterate over? I haven't actually used that ForEach method
blazing pagoda
As far as I know, there's no entities yet when all managers are created ?
gusty comet
Hm, so I can only create them but not check existing ones in OnCreate. Okay.
blazing pagoda
Where's that ForEach thing from by the way ? I don't seem to have it in my ComponentSystems
gusty comet
It's the recommended way of iterating in non job component systems.
Lets you get IComponentData as well as MonoBehaviours if you want.
blazing pagoda
Does the latest version of Entities let you use CreateArchetypeChunkArray() with SetFilter() ? If so, how do I go about doing it ? Do I just SetFilter, start the job, set it again, start next job, then wait for all of em to complete, or ?
soft nova
Is there anything specific that needs to be done to have pure entities work on the editor (not in play mode)? I can see that they are added, but they just don't do anything
Wait nvm, it works on non created worlds. So the issue is my new world
ebon narwhal
Do we have any news as for when we will be able to test UI features and Unity's 2D features with the ECS and Burst compiler ?
I am mostly interested for the sprite renderers
tawdry tree
You can already make 2d stuff with quad meshes, but I suppose it doesn't have quite the same simplicity of use
ebon narwhal
I have already done that ( I have been doing that in the past when we did not have sprite renderers available ). But indeed it does not feel right at the moment to reverse completely what i have invested time into.
near gulch
is there networking support for ECS yet
tawdry tree
There isn't not ECS support? If you're wondering if you can use those convenient 'just slap em on and play' scripts, then the answer is no; you'll need to use lower level code and/or hybrid, I believe.
near gulch
i don't think so
manic aurora
the new unity.networking supports jobs, but it passes around some native arrays under the hood that make it impossible for the ECS dependency-resolution to detect that said native array is still being accessed
mystic mountain
Hey! Trying to get a hang on the unity ECS concepts. Currently looking on archetypes. So from what I kind of get is that they are a composition of ComponentData like A=[positions][rotation] B=[position][rotation][velocity] etc. But mixing SharedComponentData into this, will each unique value of ShareComponentData create a new archetype?
i.e. C=[position][rotation][mesh = "human"] D=[position][rotation][mesh = "bird"] (where mesh is SharedComponentData)?
tawdry tree
No, an archetype just defines which components are/should be attached.
If differently valued shared components made separate archetypes, then what about differently valued components? As you can imagine, there are more than a few issues with separating things like that. I like to think of archetypes as an interface/recipe for components.
mystic mountain
Hmm, ok. I thought it was more like a "prefab" kind of thinking. But its like each Archetype represents a collection of chunks, and further what I understand entities with same SharedComponentData are grouped in the same chunks.
In this they say that the RockeTShip and Bullet are two archetypes? https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples/blob/master/Documentation~/ecs_concepts.md
manic aurora
i mean, in practice, you will just use archetypes to instantiate entities with fixed initial components. there will of course, also be conditionally added components, but if they aren't known at the time of instantiation, you wont' have any "in-code" archetype for them. you could REFER TO an entity with a particular set of components as "having a certain archetype", but even when you are working with chunks, you won't ask for "give me chunks of this archetype", you will ask for specific component(s) that could be on multiple different archetypes (that will all be iterated).
yes, shared component will split up your chunks for the same archetype. would i refer to each combination of components + shared component value a new archetype? nah
mystic mountain
I see, well when reading the docs and listening to talks its good if everyone has the same definition, then you can argue that their definition is bad x)
light sage
oof, I restructured my folders and namespace, and got things working again, but now I'm getting "Saved by batching: 0" when I was getting around 9 for that value before. I made a few other minor changes, but can't quite seem to get that value back from 0, and I didn't save a mirror of what I had. Anyone have even a clue what I may have done to prevent the batching?
With what I had before, the only difference I can conclude for sure is that I was using fields to declare specific entity managers for seperate tasks, and what I have now just "gets or creates" one when I need
soft nova
Does your material has GPU instancing enabled?
light sage
Ah, good call, I changed my material up eartlier
let me check if that's it
how do I give karma
soft nova
I believe that this server doesn't have anything for karma, glad to know that the issue was easily fixed
light sage
yea, me too, I honestly never would have thought of that since I change the scripts so much, glad someone had the insight
mystic mountain
From the ECS docs it is said that you would commonly create a simulation World and a rendering World. Isn't the idea behind the World that you don't use them together, there can be a "entity: 2" in both of them? Anyone who could give some insight of how they are thinking here or if I got it all backwards?
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples/blob/master/Documentation~/world.md
tawdry tree
There was a discussion about how to handle/do that earlier, but I believe the conclusion was basically π€· unless you already know you might wanna wait until they make that easier/make a good example.
The first step would be that each world can only have one entityManager, so if you manage to get multiple different entityManagers, you have different worlds.
The goal with separating simulation from rendering is that you can render at glorious (insert fastest commercial screen update rate here) FPS even if your simulation stutters or just runs like shit at like 1-5 FPS.
mystic mountain
Hmm ok, not sure I follow the reasonining. You could also just make the simulation systems togglable and break them from the rendering systems, which is kind of basic and what you usually do?
light sage
Yea Jaws, that's how it's supposed to work, but how it is now, unity does it's own stuff with the "WorldDiffer" and we do stuff with the world. It should be that there is a ghost world that just calculates, and another world in charge of transforming and rendering
my question is with the new hybrid rendering module, why can't we see the outlines of out entities meshes in scene view? I just got my infinite universe simulation "pretty much" working, but there are some issues I really need a visual to work out.
light sage
NotImplementedException: The method or operation is not implemented.
Unity.Rendering.InstancedRenderMeshBatchGroup.OnPerformCulling (UnityEngine.Rendering.BatchRendererGroup rendererGroup, UnityEngine.Rendering.BatchCullingContext cullingContext)
This error, and the the address in the scripts
light sage
got ecs to cooperate
sharp nacelle
do we have a sticky or a page with the latest and greatest ECS samples and resources? the official samples github got a bit empty in the recent updates and many other projects are from last year and don't reflect the latest changes anymore.
Sorry if this gets asked a lot π
dull copper
it's a common issue really
ECS evolves a lot
and almost nobody who shares examples bothers to keep the up-to-date with latest conventions
https://rams3s.github.io/blog/2019-01-09-ecs-deep-dive/
https://www.bovinelabs.com/ecs-hello-world/
are fairly recent notes about ECS
neither of them cover ForEach but official samples do
light sage
https://gametorrahod.com/@5argon this is indespensible
kinda provides an insightful timeline for us newcomers
dull copper
there's some weird stuff too though
like comparison between ue4 and unity when he's only used Unreal for few weeks π
you can't objectively compare the two with that little experience on UE4
but yeah, this is offtopic, sorry about that π
light sage
yea, I take the meat lol
dull copper
it's funny though, as people who move from Unity to Unreal have some urge to immediately praise how much better the UE4 is based on their early impressions, you don't see these people coming back when their expectations have been readjusted to reality
full stirrup
ive used both for about 7 years and still continue to use both
dull copper
yeah, they both have their own good things and painpoints for sure
sharp nacelle
@dull copper thanks, that should help me get up to speed. Last time I played around with ECS was in November or December I think, and a lot of stuff has changed already π
sharp nacelle
while I'm at it: does anyone have experiences with creating managers in the ECS worlds? I'm trying to extend ScriptBehaviourManager, but the InternalUpdate function is internal and abstract, thus preventing me from using the class at all.
Basically I need to implement the function to compile, but can't because it's internal. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the new Managers system.
light sage
I've tried reflection with the assemblies, but from looking through stuff it seems they either haven't gotten to implementation yet, or (more likely, from the names of the assembly definiotns and todo: commentary), they're going to decrease what we can actually do in scripts in favor of bringing that functionality to GUI elements in the unity editor. But I hope it's the former. The noise library in the new math package works amazing with ecs in burst, having fun with that atm and not getting anything concrete done
lime dome
this blog post just dropped and I'm trying to understand something
when he says "We will slowly but surely port every piece of performance critical code that we have in C++ to HPC#." does he mean just ECS stuff, or the whole engine in it's entirety?
later he says "By writing Unityβs runtime code in HPC#, the engine and the game are written in the same language. "
which makes it sound like he means everything
that would be a huge shift to rewrite everything in their stripped down C# instead of C++
untold night
that's pretty much what I expected would happen.
Outside of platform-specific and/or licensed integrations, there will eventually be no reason to have so much of the engine be a black box C++ thing that's harder to maintain for feature teams
especially when so many of their issues are likely down to how data is marshalled back and forth between C# and C++
it's basically a game of don't break the garbage collector when you're dealing with that much interop
lime dome
I guess that does make sense
light sage
what's a good approach for GUI elements atm? bring the component data over to the Monobehavior in an OnGUI, or is it worth is to try to setup a GUI system in ECS? I can't think of a good way to deal with strings, but strings are generally going to be consistent for my nrrds with numerical data being the major fluxuation in that regard
soft nova
Depending on what you want to do with the UI, but for just showing data. IMO is not worth it
light sage
true, it's just bothersome to have the monbehaviour holding up the other threads from accessing my components, I'm going to have to implement a unversal timer at some point anyway to manage things. I altered the timestep for testing and some of my jobs were outpacing others because I didn't have my dependencies setuup correctly. ECS atm feels like writing an engine from scratch
dull copper
@lime dome that's what Unity has messaged since last year now
they can't port like everything to c# side
you still need c++ for accessing the hw
but for most engine components, they can do that
there will still be some things on c++ but they can keep that side slim if they want to
lime dome
I see
dull copper
it's good though
as it mean we'll get more source access to unity code than now
I hope some day they get the core so slim they don't need licensed 3rd party content there and they can open it to all users as well :p
but that's me being hopeful
competition gives you full source code access already so this is one big limitation for Unity right now
lime dome
yes, that's true
urban rivet
@lime dome eventually all of unity will be C#
Well, C# authored but compiled to better than standard C++ machine code
It's higher performance in the end for them to do this because there's no bottleneck between C++ and C# worlds then
managed memory etc
I think it'll take a few years so really, I would say it'll be a good time to start after GDC for your own stuff. At least I think it'll be less wild west by this point.
lime dome
yeah I guess I have a hard time believing C# is faster than C++. goes against decades of conventional wisdom π
but if they have pulled that off, awesome
urban rivet
It's not really C# or C++ that's faster anyway
the language has always been irrelivant
the compiler is king
Of course we're not allowed to use it all, but you know what I mean!
Tron knows best
lime dome
yeah I know, but usually C#'s compiler wasn't the best.
I guess it was just a matter of time until they reached parity
urban rivet
C# compiler will remain poo I think
just not this bit
it does stand to reason though, there is plenty in C++ land we can do to kill our perf that we don't even need to touch really
lime dome
oh absolutely.
urban rivet
Anything we touch in our games that has something to do with perf will likely end up in C#
dull copper
yeah but I now talk about hw interfacing, that's traditionally been c++
altho it would be fancy if they could get that done too
but looking at current development it doesn't seem it's going that way, a lot of upcoming new systems still rely on slim c++ counterparts
and I don't think Unity has ever tried to hide that
I know Joachim mentioned it still being there on their goal for this
safe lintel
i hope blittable bools are introduced at gdc, alongside something meaty like physics π
dull copper
heh
pretty sure everyone has worked around it but it's still weird it got removed before any alternative
knotty radish
I can live with a byte as a bool
We won't have outofthebox physics any time this year I think, there is just too much to do before that
safe lintel
noo dont crush my dreams
knotty radish
Hey but UTiny editor tools coming to ECS is already something
I just hope they will change the file extension name
".ut*" π«
dull copper
unreal tournament
knotty radish
Yes exactly I can only see that
dull copper
I'm more hopeful on the HPC# physics
Unity has been clear that it's not going to be full blown physics engine but simpler setup
untold night
I doubt a whole physics stack will be at GDC, but I'd like at least a good basic collision / spatial query solution that's not the current weird physx hack for raycasts
just a "here's an octree, capsule, sphere, box and mesh collider alternative, along with all of the *Casts alternatives"
dull copper
so there are real chances on seeing the first iteration this year
untold night
and also compute penetration alternative
knotty radish
"compute penetration alternative"
Yes this
safe lintel
where did they mention its not going to be a full blown thing? always thought it was going to eventually replace physx
dull copper
maybe eventually
urban rivet
@untold night I'd be happy with raycast vs static mesh plus basic support for box, sphere and capsule colliders, I don't even need anything fancy
dull copper
Joachim wrote on https://forum.unity.com/threads/sources-available-physics-in-pure-ecs.531716/#post-3499243A C# based physics engine with source for pure ECS, with the aim of brute force simple readable code, is something we want to build.
of course that was almost year ago
so plans could have evolved
(and probably have)
urban rivet
Hopefully because unoptimised ECS physics are still ECS physics that are wasting perf...
dull copper
I'd want convex collisions, overlap and cast queries
safe lintel
nothing there strikes me as cut down in any way
dull copper
and doing those would require a broadphase π
urban rivet
yeah just convex+primitives vs mesh and themselves
dull copper
yeah, I guess it doesn't, I just read it so π
urban rivet
dont need to worry about special stuff or joints
dull copper
"brute force simple readable code" is usually meaning it doesn't do dozen things with all the bells and whistles tho
urban rivet
or it means no broadphase :P
urban rivet
a physics engine without broadphase wouldn't really be that useful imo
I guess for simple games then... why use ECS?
dull copper
it can be simple AABB thing even
but I bet they figure out some fancy setup for it
like they did with the static object culling on ECS
urban rivet
physx is pretty nice peformance at the moment but suffers some bottlenecks with the oncollision stuff, even with GC alloc removed, there's a lot of overhead still happening
untold night
I mean I'm making a 2.5D action platformer on 3D rails with small to large-ish levels. My use case is the following:
- Character vs Static World Geo
- Character vs Moving World Geo
- Hitbox vs Hurtbox
- Some rays for platforming/AI
- the actual "physics" will need to be hand-rolled like my earlier prototypes
@urban rivet - agreed, I'll expound for some folks:
I like physx but the main problem it, Box2D, and a few other middleware bits Unity uses is it's still kind of it's own thing with its own conventions and you have to map Unity conventions to PhysX conventions. They also don't expose everything due to opportunity cost + shifts in an API they don't control.
Honestly Unreal ditching almost every out-of-the-box 3rd-party integration makes total sense, you have to bend over backwards to meet both the licensing and API restrictions and you may not legally be able to expose as much as some users need without jumping through hoops.
This is less of an issue now that PhysX is open source, and it's not a problem with Box2D given that it was always (I think?) open source, but for stuff like Beast/Enlighten/Substance it's been very apparent.
dull copper
tbh, Unreal exposes so little of the physics mainly because Epic's own games work with the setup they have
I'm sure they could expose everything there without issues if they wanted to
but there you at least have source access so you can expose what you need (like I did with physx contact modifications and fixed timestepping for physics which UE4 doesn't support out of the box)
the main issue in Unity is that we have no control over the integration
and if you need some niche feat, it's going to stay low on internal priorities
as majority will not benefit from it
this is one big reason why I'm excited about DOTS
as it finally gives more power to users by giving more source code access due to the new things being (mostly) on c# side
untold night
also Unity feature engineers can work more effectively with less WTF bugs caused by weird C++ compiler behaviors.
dull copper
I'm not totally convinced on that one yet
dull copper
but on the bright side, they'll be WTF:ing on DOTS bugs
so it's definitely win for us
as they will without a doubt make it more robust because of it
untold night
it's less bugs with C++ itself and more the Marshalling between C++ <-> C#
like they've said in the past if you don't do the translation for certain calls and data structures it will break the GC
dull copper
afaik, burst works without il2cpp, they convert IL to LLVM and from there to machine code
untold night
yeah, for burst code at least, it's just machine code the C++ is talking to
light sage
my il2cpp standalone windows builds have been noticeably the smoothest
dull copper
Burst is a compiler, it translates from IL/.NET bytecode to highly optimized native code using LLVM.
untold night
I have worked with C++/CLI exactly once and never again.
I'm sure Unity probably has their own bindings and not that hybrid monstrosity but yikes. I still had to write custom marshalling code and that was half the headache.
One of the reasons I dislike Objective-C is the syntax discontinuity
light sage
I was considering doing some work w/ pointers and marshalling with ECS, but it was leading to more trouble than it was worth
being as the editor supports this at 10x this scale with my poorly optimized ecs mess, I don't really see the need for lower level access until I get around to serverside implementation
I just have to learn to settle fights between the threads, the reder queue, layers and the z-axis
the new math library may have it's basis even lower than C++...I can't see how they could have the hardware access to generate that kind of entropy with c#...c# is user-friendly,, but also very limited in compasrison to C++
urban rivet
@untold night Another major (essential TBH) reason for inhouse physics over physx regardless of licensing, is that in this case, a properly deterministic physics engine will perform best, and of course make it a game changer for networking...
Quite a literal game changer with what it'd empower you with.
This also saves money in server upkeep obviously, so it's beyond a performance issue
Latency on opposite sides of the world would be almost similar to local for a lot of games too...
dull copper
I don't really see how you could fight latency with that at all
sure you don't have to wait for corrections from server (as deterministic physics don't drift) but other users actions still can only happen on the other client after the messages get there
but when you have pvp collisions in real-time online game, latency will always be an issue and no determinism can help that
light sage
and tailor made in-house compensation system is going to outperform a non-costom tailored one
but, yea, optic fiber can't be programmed
only contracted out by ajit pai or whoever
lime dome
ijit pie sounds about right
dull copper
You can send smaller packets I suppose
urban rivet
you can escape doing anything for a large amount of things and fix all sorts of rollback or prediction
also box landing in australia will happen same time as a box landing in america
See gaffer's articles on it for a bit more, he simmed a few hundred physics things on network
dull copper
But you also cant quantize all the values so you end up sending full resolution data
I think I've read most of his articles
My core issue regarding latency is still player vs player collisions.. Only thing that can dramatically help on that is lower ping
On nonphysics heavy games, you can hide that better
urban rivet
but with determinism the idea is that when anything collides, both can be adjusted instantly and perfectly locally and correctly
dull copper
Nope
dull copper
That cant happen as your clients dont have realtime data on moment of impact
urban rivet
in practise it doesn't matter much
dull copper
They can guess where other player was or what it was doing
But that guess will not be deterministic
urban rivet
in typical games the characters haven't even moved far for half a second's latency
dull copper
In physics sims, even last digit from float value can throw collisions in seemingly different direction on some cases
urban rivet
how if it's deterministic?
trail burrow
hey
urban rivet
yo
dull copper
Doesnt matter. Your input data never is
urban rivet
please teach us master fholm
trail burrow
lol
dull copper
Due to the latency
trail burrow
in a fully deterministic and predicted enviroment
player collisions resolve perfectly
every time
untold night
Determinism is also good for replay/journalling/automated testing/AI training
trail burrow
@untold night yup
@untold night also makes spectating games easy, just send the input stream
so little bandwidth
dull copper
Only way you can guarantee you feed the simulation with exact same data is to stall the simulation, basically lag everything
trail burrow
yes, predict/rollback
we predict remote players inputs, then rollback the entire world
on mispredictions
dull copper
Yeah. Thats fine, but you still do get the initial error
urban rivet
If unity isn't planning to do that I might as well just make it email turn based
trail burrow
@dull copper yeah but that initial error is usually fairly minor, especially when dealing with something that's even remotely not instant acc/deacc
@urban rivet i doubt they are tbh, quantum is a dedicated setup because the chance of miss-predictions (and thus rollbacks you perform) scales with player count
so it requires a custom setup to be fast enough
urban rivet
right
trail burrow
@dull copper this last one is the most important for our convo
that is two players, both with 250 ping
one watching the other player move around
this is all built in quantum
urban rivet
for smaller games you don't need ecs at all, just a deterministic physics network engine
I guess you started with that?
trail burrow
well quantum has its own ecs, state definition language (compiles to c#), own physics engines, etc.
dull copper
I'd debate most smaller games dont "need" determinism
urban rivet
there can't really be a separation between physics and networking IMHO.
trail burrow
@urban rivet nope
dull copper
It helps but people have managed without
trail burrow
@dull copper well the benefit of something like quantum is that you can have people basically write a single player game that works in multiplayer, since you dont need to do anything other than your game logic/ui/etc.
there's no MP code
that is the 100% big win
plus it handles shitty network conditions better than regular networking
so really good for mobile games, etc.
urban rivet
actually the shitty network quality is a point I hadn't thought about
so games will just feel great mostly
dull copper
But then you have to deal with exit games who get so pissed off when you discuss their own licensing that they just boot people off their support discord :p
urban rivet
I guess I'm not going to get this from Unity within 2 years.
dull copper
I have huge respect for @fholm. Just cant see doing any further business with a company that cant openly discuss their public terms
dull copper
ik, still bummed that they booted me tho :D
trail burrow
i mean the ECS is ... it's good, but i don't see most games needing the performancea
and the job system is generally not usable for dedicated servers anyway
urban rivet
truth is I'm likely to go with photon for networking becuse I am not experienced enough to deal with shit (tm) and I am utterly clueless at running servers.
unless unity has a hot networking thing lined up, I can't be blamed, right?
look, if I was stupid, I would be trying to do all that myself
I think indies are best off upping their single player game, or even couch co op
trail burrow
@urban rivet yeah for sure, but like in the case with quantum we have a lot of teams that have never done MP before, even smaller indie teams (3-4 ppl)
and they couldn't find/didn't want to get a networking guy
and quantum basically just lets them write gameplay
as they would normally
but quantum isnt for every game, it's a specific product built for one purpose, it's not a one-size-fits-all silver bullet for MP at all
urban rivet
it seems to me it's for games that are mp centric, rather than sp games with optional mp
urban rivet
it's battle royale friendly :P
light sage
my game would probably function fine relyaing network data through telnet
or even an irc channel lol
my "cluster" could literally probably be a freenode server on a unix box running on dsl
safe lintel
i just noticed you can rename entities in the debugger, is it possible to assign an entity a name via script?
knotty radish
Are you working on Quantum (like at Photon enterprise)?
light sage
@safe lintel yea, it's setName, a property set with EntityManager. It's helpful for finding the entities easier in the debugger
possibly a method, I forgot
safe lintel
thanks @light sage !
dull copper
@safe lintel just be aware that entity naming is editor only thing
That stuff helps a lot in debugger and in forthcoming ecs editor but there is no reason to waste memory on it in actual builds so it gets wiped from builds
Btw. Hybrid Renderers gameobject scene conversion tool also does this: once scene is converted to ecs world, new entities hold their old gameobject names
gusty comet
How do systems run without being attached anywhere in the scene?
gusty comet
safe lintel
Yeah I figured as much, thats all I need it for. Trying to figure out which entity is what without names is enough to drive one to the edge of madness
gusty comet
Ughh, I'll have to think of how to jobify random generation that syncs to a Unity tilemap. The pain is I don't even have chunks, it's all a queue of position snapshots with some info about previous steps and some querying the tilemap for taken tiles.
gusty comet
Anybody know how to imitate tilemap structure in a native container?
gusty comet
Specifically position lookup, I need to check if a tile is empty or not.
Using its x and y coordinates of course.
tawdry tree
If you can access the container, then you just need to have it structured in a way that helps with that, but I don't know how to do the access part
gusty comet
I suppose I can use NativeHashmap that uses a position struct with x & y as the map's key.
tawdry tree
The easiest is a 2D collection, but you'd get better performance from flattering it, such that instead of
[[1,1 2,1 3,1]
[1,2 2,2 3,2]
[1,3 2,3 3,3]]
you have
[1,1 2,1 3,1 1,2 2,2 3,2 1,3 2,3 3,3]
That requires known sizes, though. You could achieve that by chunking the map up, but that adds further complexity...
gusty comet
No known size, also infinite upwards π
I'll have a death level rising destroying the lower tiles though.
tawdry tree
A mentioned, you could chunk it, so for every, say, 10x10 tiles you make a chunk. But then you need to potentially chunk those...
Really, having a proper way to lookup a given Entity (tile) by struct (coords) would be ideal, but I'm scratching my head as to how
gusty comet
That'd be a cache miss so there probably isn't a way to do that.
tawdry tree
Keep in mind that while performance is great, sometimes you just need tot get shit done, and worry about it later. Someone more experienced with ECS might have a better answer, tho
gusty comet
Yeah, my non threaded implementation takes 1 second for 10000 iterations, so it's more about keeping stuff async as player moves upwards.
tawdry tree
Hmm, a descent search using linked entities might work. Ie. you have an origin chunk available, then you just consistently move towards the chunk you need. The issue is that everything needs to be in memory, though.
Google-fu tells me that the NativeHashmap structure might help you do what you're looking for
gusty comet
Yeah, I already mentioned that.
tawdry tree
Ah, i missed that message while writing mine
But as far as I can tell, hashmap with the the index coming from the position sounds close to ideal
gusty comet
Actually, looking at my original implementation, all I need is a hashset of vector3s.
But there's only a hashmap, hmmm.
Oh, I guess I could hash the position and use it as a chunk id in a multihashmap and then just do a linear search in values with that key since it allows doing this.
Does that sound good?
Are concurrent writes to the same native container atomic btw? I kinda need generation jobs to always have the latest data when there are multiple of them cause otherwise they'll get old data and put things where they overlap.
@tawdry tree
tawdry tree
Sounds good, your position is something like this?
struct Vector2Int {
int X;
int Y;
}
No clue about how atomic the operations are.
gusty comet
Yeah.
I have another question then.
I need to query that a tile was marked as taken or marked as must be unoccupied.
What's better, 2 multihashmaps of chunk id to int2 or a single map of chunk id to a struct of int2 and a taken or forced free flag for these 2 types of special tiles?
tawdry tree
Uh, not sure I understand the question
gusty comet
I need to query 2 types: if a tile was marked as "do not block" or was taken by a block. I can either make a single hashmap for them and have a flag of their kind with each of them or just make separate maps.
NativeMultiHashMap<int, int2> taken;
NativeMultiHashMap<int, int2> doNotBlock;
vs
enum Kind
{ Taken, DoNotBlock }
stuct SpecialTile
{
int2 Postion;
Kind Kind;
}
NativeMultiHashMap<int, SpecialTile> specialTiles;
I'll need to query both but which one is theoretically friendlier to cache?
tawdry tree
I don't know about the gritty specifics. Also keep in mind the danger of premature (over)optimization. (which of course depends on what you're trying to accomplish and for what platform, etc.)
On the maintenance side, though, it seems to me like one method might be a lot easier to code and maintain/understand than the other, depending on the context and use and such.
gusty comet
@tawdry tree okay. I'll go with a unified map for now. Also there's apparently an IJob interface for iterating mutlimap, which is pretty neat. I'm going to need to destroy some of them when they go below a certain height.
How can I return no job in JobComponentSystem's OnUpdate? Let's say some condition isn't met so I don't want to schedule any jobs.
safe lintel
return the original jobhandle in OnUpdate?
{
return inputDeps;
}``` I would assume it would still make sense to schedule the jobs and keep the dependencies and have them not work rather than not scheduling but idkThat works, I just wasn't sure if I was doing it correctly @safe lintel
Managed to recreate my structure in the job, now I just need to port over the actual generator and then make a system to sync tile entities to Unity tilemap, yay.
private struct GenerationJob : IJob
{
[ReadOnly]
public GenerationState State;
public NativeMultiHashMap<uint, SpecialTile> SpecialTiles;
public NativeQueue<GenerationState> States;
I wonder if I'm doing something wrong, but the job actually needs all of this shared state with write access to work in a connected path generation. I wonder if it even threads.
Cause I just do this to keep the latest data ```cs
if(states.Count == 0)
{
Enabled = false;
return inputDeps;
}
GenerationJob job = new GenerationJob
{
State = states.Dequeue(),
SpecialTiles = specialTiles,
States = states
};```
safe lintel
tbh i havent messed around with enabling or disabling a system but does the system give errors if there arent states for it to process?
I personally have a bunch of systems where if there isnt stuff for it to do, I dont really do anything different than if there was, they just always run. Im sure someone more advanced can interject but I personally dont see the value in going out of my way to disable a system if there isnt data for it to process
gusty comet
@safe lintel if there are no more states, that'd mean the generator fucked up. Right now I'm just testing if my chunk tile search works so I disable it to avoid getting my console flooded with the same debug messages of marked positions.
I just removed the debug log calls from the snippet.
light sage
yea, a lot of this paradigm is so foriegn to me, and inaccesble without a lot of trial and error. I have lots of jobs that need the postional data from my "player" (almost all of my jobs need this atm) , but I don't won't to bring my "player" entity's positional component into every single job. Firstly, it seems they would have to filter to see if there is another "LocalShipPositionalComponent", which would never be the case,(does the DissallowMultipleComponents attribute let the jobs know to not search all about? I doubt it) and also, I can't figure out the proper way to bring components from multiple entities into a job. That's my major issue.
TL;DR; how do I bring in two or more distinct component types into a job so that I can work with those two or more components? If I include them in the IJobProcessComponentData type filter, I don't get any components. Is this what inject was for, or am I (I wouldn't be surprised) missing something blatantly obvious. The only way I know to do this is with GetSingleton<WhataverCompoentStruct>().whateverproperty stuck in the jobs OnUpdate constructor/loop, and I know this isn't the correct way
light sage
I mean I guess it's a structural flaw in my planning also, a lot of what goes on in my jobs could be reduced to functions (methods, not used to c#). And some of the positional data could be handled with a separate data structure (sql or smth) since it's not as frequently needed. Btw, I'm not complaining, lol, I went into this with the knowledge that this was experimental and not well documented, it's just so difficult to make dynamic expansions as opposed to standard run-of-the-mill OOP. I.E. I'm trying to incorporate a purely simulatory zed axis that's locally irrelavent (the skybox just rotates, no real positioanl change, but does become relevant when "warping", and it's basically looking like it's going to either not be a feature or require a complete restructuring of well, pretty much everything. maybe I need more than one GameObject, or maybe less in my monobehavior that I do have. not even sure
honestly probably just feeling stupid about spending all my spare overhead on reinventing what I realize now is just an ECS particle system
lime dome
looks like a job for visual effects graph
light sage
yep, that's a week wasted, sounds about identical to what I created without any of the overhead clogging my game loop
lime dome
well, it was still a good exercise to learn about the ECS
i still haven't touched ECS myself
so you're ahead of me hehe
light sage
I wanted multithreading, but now I want my gameobjects back
dull copper
nobody is forcing you to ECS if you only want jobs + burst
π
even unity does that for some of their systems
light sage
I like to learn things the hard way, I'll probably end up with my own engine on top of the Unity engine. But I think that's a good suggestion, try to take what I have and translate it back to a hybrid approach
dull copper
my main annoyance is that you can't handle jobs + burst outside of the main thread
that pretty much ruins my plans on running custom physics on separate thread and getting burst gains there
I actually did a prototype where I ran my own threading on c++ native dll that handled netcode, physics and input
light sage
yea exactly, I wanted the simulation world vs. presentation world thing going on
gusty comet
Run them inside a job π€
dull copper
that's not the solution to my issue
light sage
with the cpu taking all that load
light sage
OnUpdate doesn't wait for Update so it's async in a way
or more likely I'm still not understanding. I just know when I changed the timestep I got some funny things happening
like in this video my jobs are out of sync
it's a ridiculous timestep, but the homeade particle system (two seperate jobs, working on that), just can't keep up with a different set of jobs, which is actually locked to the main thread like you said due to the camera adjustment being in the monobehaviors update method.
which grabs it's data from an entity that ghosts the ships positional data so as to not lock the ships's positional entity to the main thread
And actually that just made me realize what's happening here. The camera can't keep up with the ships movement because the ships movement isn't locked to the main thread. The ghost, which grabs positional data directly from the ship, is also locked to the main thread, but it's missing steps exposing a hole in the entire concept behind my idea for keeping the ship stationary in respect to the particles (given a riduculous timestep). But this kind of "bad" async just want fly, because it could easily be abused if it's applied to more than purely aesthetic data
but the only solution is dependencies, which would result in what you were saying with everything locked to the monobehavior's update method. Or we get rid of the monobehavior altogether. I don't thinks that's possible right now. And I was going to build a "kernel" system, as a sort of proxy between things, and a way to maintime syncronization between asyncronous processes, but that flopped because it would litterally need to take in every single entity the way I had it figured. Or I add an irrelevent component to the entities it needs
spiral holly
I want to learn ECS
light sage
@spiral holly GmanGavin, it's hard to learn ECS right now, a lot of stuff just got deprecated and the normal "google my way to a Master's Degree in a few weeks" approach isn't possible. there's very little relevant information out there. But you should still learn it if you have the spare time to waste. I can answer questions here about the common roadblocks you may have starting learning it now, since I started a week ago
A lot of method names changed for instance, and they apparently stripped 90% of the examples from the github repository
gusty comet
It's hard trying to learn from the FPS sample when it uses ECS and it's changing
light sage
The boids sample is almost completely irrelevant to me,indeed
and the link to the "twin stick shooter" demo is dead, so I haven't even viewed it. But for large projects, there's literally no references to use. Maybe one or two youtube videos that use injection which is deprecated
I mean....I wrote this in 12 hours one day, that's when I decided to download Unity and do game dev. I was tired of web dev. But to produce the same result in unity has taked aroudn 144 hours https://vincible-whip.000webhostapp.com/ Edit: unity ECS. Using gameobjects it would be like 30 minutes
lime dome
yeah i was going to say, the web version just looks like some transparent textures side-scrolling π
which is very simple to do
light sage
yea, the web version was going to grow, but I didn't think javascript would be able to handle my master vision
It didn't even reuse the old symmetrical backgrounds, it created a new one each time. Game Dev has a lot of trade secrets I'm having to learn
@lime dome it was simple, but the first time doing something like that is was a fun challenge, I just want to fly my artwork really fast inside a skybox of my astrophotography in Eve Online/ksp style in all honestly
lime dome
yeah i just meant in terms of taking 144 hours π
light sage
oh lol
I have a launcher with smtp and boxes and inpus and password, with a sqllite data mockup, and stuff like that
so no, not 144 just for the ecs skybox/homeade particlesystem
lime dome
yeah, i saw your elaboration to 30 minutes and that's why i was like "that's more like it" haha
light sage
yea, I was just referencing the translating everything to ECS with no knowledge of ECS difficulties
lime dome
yep learning new systems and methodologies always takes a lot of time
light sage
very true! I quit college Junior year to do art, because the CS program at my uni was a joke
But now the logical side of my brain feels jealous and wants in on the action
I had a hard time only in one class called JCL. It stands for Job Control Language, and is actually like IBM's zOS' own version of ECS with a spooler, it's a nasty paradigm for those of us who are more inclined to hollistic, abstract thought patterns
untold night
coming from C/C++, ECS feels more right and my biggest issue is having to unlearn the intense desire to build excess scaffolding like OOP trains you to do.
light sage
@untold night with OOP though, I like having that scaffolding, i.e. all my spaceships are going to have all of these engines, so when I need one I just use a constructor from an abstract spaceship class. I was really disapointed when I learned unity GO c# classes inhereted*spelledworng from monobehaviors and they didn't use constructors
untold night
Yeah that was pretty disappointing as well. I kind of understand with the whole "MonoBehaviours live in both C++ and C#" and by the time they realized it was an issue it was already too deeply ingrained into everything.
light sage
I'm trying to use entities like objects, but that's just not ok, it doesn't work lol
lime dome
monobehavior never really bothered me
lime dome
you can just stick the monobehavior on a Gameobject as a prefab, and 'construct' one whenever you want by instantiating.
light sage
right, but I like passing the params in the constructor
lime dome
or you can even just apply the component to a Gameobject you create at runtime and do it that way
but I prefer to use prefabs myself
well you can send 'params' to the class once it's instantiated
or at any time really
dull copper
afaik, there's no official world if ECS editor will get prefabs or not
I know Tiny Mode lets you make those from the scene hierarchy but they don't really work π
untold night
the best solution for you might be to write static helpers that construct different configurations of entities.
also, you can put whatever constructors on component structs that you want
light sage
yea, it's just all new I guess, it's hard to learn to do things differently, syntax is somewhat new, first rodeo with C#, only limited Java before and a ton of python, js, and php
dull copper
prefabs are great for world building though, I would be surprised if there wouldn't be something similar for ECS
you need some way to preset things
(without coding it)
light sage
so if I add constructors to my components is that goin to mess with the efficiency concept of ECS
untold night
ah that explains it. If you're not as used to the lower-level processing it can be a bit of a 180-degree head turn
I was looking at ECS type frameworks for unity years before the official announcement, after a friend of mine and I were basically moving in that direction instinctively anyway
we made a crappy ECS framework entirely by accident, as we were basically moving towards managers and simpler components to deal with perf / org issues on a project
nope
if well optimized, the perf cost can be negligible or optimized away completely
and I mean the compiler
light sage
yea, when I read the ECS concept it sounded so appealing/intuitive/and logically appropriate, a "living database" so to speak. I felt I had the solution to database problems, and could have item compoents, ship components, engine compoents, etc, with my systems being a neural network of worker bees
all in a muti-threaded and threadsafe environ, meaning no more trying to trick unity into allowing me to multithread. or settling for subroutines.And then reality hit, with actual syntax restrictions and implementation using types as filters, and not having direct access to my entities and basically just being backwards in my thinking
I suppose I need to learn the alternative to injection, that's probably the puzzle piece that's preventing the lightbulb from turning on
protected override JobHandle OnUpdate (JobHandle job1)
{
float3 b = new float3( 1.8f , 2.2f , 10.4f );
int DataX = GetSingleton<OverlordData>().localX;
int DataY = GetSingleton<OverlordData>().localY;
int moving_right = GetSingleton<OverlordData>().off_Loops_Right;
int moving_up = GetSingleton<OverlordData>().off_Loops_Up;
int moving_left = GetSingleton<OverlordData>().off_Loops_Left;
int moving_down = GetSingleton<OverlordData>().off_Loops_Down;
var job = new TileShifter()
{
a1 = new float2(noise.cellular(b)),
a2 = new float2(noise.cellular(b)),
dataX = DataX,
dataY = DataY,
m_right = moving_right,
m_left = moving_left,
m_up = moving_up,
m_down = moving_down
};
return job.Schedule( this , job1 );```I mean, this has to be a terrible way to get this entities data into this job
componentgroups or something I think I need those
knotty radish
What type is OverlordData ?
untold night
yeah, that wall can be tough. You can DI into systems if you want, I believe there's already experimental Zenject bindings for that.
Have you read this book?
https://smile.amazon.com/Data-oriented-design-engineering-resources-schedules/dp/1916478700/
(parts of it are online but the formatting is terrible here): http://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/
It was greatly helpful in understanding the way Unity's ECS works vs the general concept of ECS. There's
I kinda feel stuff like Entitas and some other ECS-like frameworks get the general idea right, but they fall into the trap of doing the organizational part but still dealing with OOP thinking so you can't get all the benefits.
light sage
it grabs the players positional data and determines which directions it's moving,
knotty radish
What I meant was what exactly is the type of OverlordData, you could keep your data as a struct and just give that struct to your job
untold night
Yeah
light sage
@untold night I'm going to add that to my notes I'm taking, I plan to take a break from coding, for learning, I'm just hitting walls like you say
untold night
you could also get OverlordData once at the beginning of the function, you don't need to access it for each field
light sage
overlord day is the struct
knotty radish
Then why are you not giving OverlordData to your job ?
untold night
yeah, you could just pass that to the job itself
light sage
but the job uses ShipData
knotty radish
insert wat meme gif
light sage
so if I IJobProcessCompoentData<ShipData, OverlordData> they filter each other out
or no?
untold night
Not that
light sage
they're mutually exclusive types
knotty radish
OverlordData is an IComponentData ?
untold night
You can just add a normal field on the job struct itself for the singular OverlordData instance
light sage
if I I drop it in codepile can you show me rq?
that may answer all my questions actually
untold night
struct OverlordData: IComponentData
{
//...
}
struct ShipData: IComponentData
{
//...
}
struct MyJob : IJobProcessComponentData<ShipData>
{
public OverlordData Overlord;
// execute etc.
}
That's perfect legal
knotty radish
You should use the bare minimum for attributes
Like "BurstCompile" is only needed on top of your JobStruct
light sage
right, I knwo that @knotty radish I'm meaning to fix that
and I stuck burst compile everywhere a while back bc I wasn't sure lol, and wanted a fair idea of performance
less attributes means less components beings locked up from other threads
only the attributes needed for that job, no extra ones, also, makes filtering more maleable
knotty radish
From what I understand of your code, you only need to add an OverlordData field to your job, set that field, schedule and that's it
light sage
what about the entity that derives from the component though?
untold night
some points for the code you linked:
-
You can have OverlordData be in a field on the job struct, and make this way less complicated. Will also make it less error prone.
-
You could potentially convert the right/left/up/down stuff into an int2 vector for direction, or even just a single int that represents the direciton, with 0 being "nothing" 1 being "left", 2 being right, etc.
-
Since this function would do nothing if there's no movement, if the overlord data has no movement vector, IE, 0, you can just return the job handle for updates where there's no movement.
safe lintel
@light sage was that your art? if so cool stuff
untold night
- I think [ExecuteAlways] mostly applies to system declarations themselves
light sage
@safe lintel thanks, I wish I could code as well :p
I swapped the code on codepile for the overlors System
safe lintel
my background is art too, I do love the logic of programming but im really bad at stuff that requires math as i avoided it all my life until now
untold night
you're doing surprisingly well, don't get discouraged too badly.
light sage
I have about 40,000 (give or take a few thousand) lines of commented out code
and like 100 being used
I love algebra, discrete math, and algebraic calc, but I always sucks at geometry/trig kinda stuff @safe lintel
untold night
on the overlord stuff:
-
For this system at least, I'd replace off_Loops* with an int2, can do the same thing with less complications.
-
You may be able to use the new math.select(a, b, condition) to get better perf boosts with burst, since it can optimize it natively
light sage
right, I can work those thigns out recursive
knotty radish
I need to run, good luck with your project, you are on the right track!
light sage
I can always make those more efficient, but back to the iComponent inhereted struct being in the class for my job
how do I create the overlord entity itself that's linked to the data in the Icomponent struct
@knotty radish thanks. great community here, much appreciated
Also, the overlord like's to hang out in the monobehavior lol, to relay the positional data to the camera
so if he's in that class it's going to defeat that whole idea
or no?
the monobehavior is where the entity "overlord" is created right now, and his positional data is grabbed ine Mono's update to feed to the camera
safe lintel
you could use the ComponentSystem to process the OverlordData and Camera with the ForEach without necessarily having logic in your monobehaviour
light sage
If it wasn't for the camera I wouldn't even need the monobehavior after bootstrapping
tried to use pointers, couldn't get it to work
untold night
yeah, my break is almost over as well. You're on the right path.
Focus mainly on seeing what you can do to simplify the structures involved, and I think you'll have less issue with ECS.
You can put an Entity key inside another struct and that's fine.
struct MyOverlord : IComponentData
{
public Entity Value;
}
//elsewhere...
struct MoveTowardsTheOverlord IJobProcessComponentData<MyOverlord, Position>
{
[ReadOnly] public ComponentDataFromEntity<Position> OverlordPositions;
[ReadOnly] public ComponentDataFromEntity<OverlordData> OverlordData;
//etc, can use *FromEntity to check for existence, etc
}
You should look into GameObjectEntity and component proxies.
You can leave the part of the Overlord that needs a regular transform and such in MonoBehaviour land while migrating other components to ECS
safe lintel
I spent a ton of time myself trying to figure out ways to not use a monobehaviour for things in my transition to ecs but figured ah well might as well embrace it as its likely gonna be necessary for quite a while still
light sage
ok, how do I grab the key to reference an entity
I don't know how to reference the entities
untold night
yeah, just embrace the Hybrid. I tried to go full ECS and ran into the lack-of-Features wall
light sage
I know they have internal version and Index, but I need an example of using a key to grab them
thanks though
@safe lintel true, ended up settling with the same determined
untold night
that is exactly what I just showed you
alternatively you can do build/update your own mapping in a systemwith a NativeHashMap for something specific, then have things that need that data grab it later in the job chain of the same system
untold night
It's just a handle to a table row
It may or may not be there, but that's all an Entity is. Just a key struct.
This means it can be part of the payload of any other structure just fine.
light sage
lightbulb is close, thanks a ton, that last bit especially was helpful
untold night
I think they disallow it from ISharedComponentData, since that could cause a lot of fragmentation issues, but it can go in IComponentData structs, it can go in IBufferElementData, it can be a field or property on a C# class or monobehavior
so if you want an entity that tracks it's children you can make a IBufferElementData and have a buffer of tracked children Entities
if you want an entity that knows it's parent, put an IComponentData struct that has that parent Entity
light sage
also the nomenclature and stronly typed stuff is way off from python, my long time go to, so a method to me is a function and so on
untold night
anyway I do have to go off the grid for a bit to catch up on some work, good luck!
light sage
I'm going to try this stuff out, and I'm going to familiarize myself with things like "let" and lambda functions, etc, this is a good itenerary
safe lintel
anyone know how to use *FromEntity? if I have a job```
struct TestJob : IJob
{
[ReadOnly] public ComponentDataFromEntity<Projectile> ProjectileData;
public void Execute() { }
}
var job = new TestJob
{
ProjectileData = m_ProjectilesGroup.<what goes here?>
};```
safe lintel
wait but injection is on its way out right?
light sage
injection is already out in the latest packages/beta
I think that's why I can't grasp it, I never used injection
and apparently the alternative is like harder to understand, so I don't have that stepping stone
untold night
you can just grab it from EntityManager directly now
light sage
disregard that, it's still there, I read something that it wasn't or they limited it a lot, but I won't use something that's got death stamp on it
safe lintel
sorry im slow but whats the syntax for grabbing it from the entitymanager? EntityManager.GetComponentData<Projectile>(entity) doesnt appear to be correct