archived-dots

[rotund token]

i should say, i believe dots is mostly deterministic on windows on modern amd/intel cpus

at least we haven't been able to break it in 2 years

we relied on client/server to generate their own world and graph for years, i only recently change it so the server sent the graph to clients to ensure cross platform compatibility

i'm pretty sure i've seen a burst dev mention that they believe it should be fine on windows but they provide no guarantees because they don't test for it

so yeah shouldn't rely on it

but it is interesting

[devout prairie]

graph as in nav mesh or?

[rotund token]

nah voronoi

world is procedurally generated using a voronoi diagram as the root basis of room generation

[devout prairie]

ah i see

[rotund token]

i should say mono <-> il2cpp is not deterministic at all

both produce vastly different results

we couldn't play editor to builds for ages because of this

made testing a pain

from my debugging basically the first sqrt differed between mono/il2cpp

[devout prairie]

do you find il2cpp faster or is it for security or platform requirements?

[rotund token]

it's faster but we use it because we need to use il2cpp for consoles

also at some random point mono builds just stopped working for us and we couldn't bebothered debugging why

which I find amusing because most of the time people have issues with il2cpp not the other way around

[devout prairie]

yeah last time i tried il2cpp it wouldn't run but that was a while ago

[rotund token]

usually just means something is stripping

[devout prairie]

i'm quite keen on the idea of devs making games moddable, and obviously it's extremely difficult to mod a game when it's built with il2cpp compared to just, opening up the csharp assembly inside dnspy or whatever and editing/recompiling

i wonder what the pathways might be for a game built with il2cpp to potentially enable mod support, can it use/load in external dll's etc - i'm assuming that's possible

[safe lintel]

i would kill for the old quake style game folder setup, just modify the raw files for the most part to edit assets

[rotund token]

in theory, burst/entities should make modding extremely easy in the future

and once ISystem comes out in 0.50 I'm going to look into it more

because burst allows loading external burst dlls at runtime

so you should be able to point to burst systems and jobs really easy

[devout prairie]

how so? i looked at my built dll and the systems stuff is just a mess and impossible to edit/recompile

[rotund token]

i don't mean modifying the game, i mean adding systems/logic

there's actually very little reason to modify existing entities games when modding

if you can just insert your own systems

if you want your game to be really modded

[devout prairie]

that's a good point yeah

[rotund token]

you'd apply write groups to your components

that allow turning your systems off by modders

by simply adding a new component

write groups are one of the most powerful entities features that no one really uses/talks about

[coarse turtle]

im trying to do this kind of thing with miniaudio + unity and make it work with dots 😦

[devout prairie]

i think changing existing functionality would be the obvious thing.. but yeah being able to enable/disable existing systems and possible add new ones might go some way to making that possible.. probs out of reach of the majority of casual modders i'd assume tho

[rotund token]

i think changing existing functionality would be the obvious thing..
but with write groups they don't need to know the existing thing to change it!

that's the point

in theory if you simply provide a dll with all your data (components)

they can link that, build jobs/systems in unity however they want

and load it into your app without ever seeing your system code

it's conceptually beautiful

[devout prairie]

hmm yeah that makes some sense, although to really get it and i guess believe that it'd work i'd need to see it 😛

it gives some hope to that whole idea tho

[rotund token]

well do you understand write groups?

unity uses them on the TransformSystem

[devout prairie]

no i don't no i've neglected to use them so far

[rotund token]

by default unity updates LocalToWorld for you

    [WriteGroup(typeof(LocalToWorld))]
    [WriteGroup(typeof(LocalToParent))]
    public struct Translation : IComponentData```

but it's setup as a writegroup

[devout prairie]

right

[rotund token]

if you say wanted to come in and change how LocalToWorld worked

you can add a new component called

public struct CustomLocalToWorld : IComponentData

add the write group tag

and bam, unitys translation systems won't work on it anymore

for any entity you add to it

you've made that systems querying stop returning results even though it matches all components

[devout prairie]

so how does it prioritise which write group to use?

[safe lintel]

@coarse turtle are you also working on nimgui?

[rotund token]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.17/manual/ecs_write_groups.html

have a read, explain it better than i would

but yeah write groups been in forever

and no one uses them or talks about it

[devout prairie]

haha yeah i did try, and thought 'ill come back to this'

[rotund token]

but it is the ideal tool for writing extendable code/libaries

[devout prairie]

interesting yeah, will def have that in mind

[rotund token]

like imagine you have a game with a dealdamagesystem
and you made the components writegroups

but a modder wants to come along and change how damage is dealt on certain creatures, all they need to do is create a new component for that write group and then write a system to deal the damage themselves

[devout prairie]

i think for some games it really makes sense to 'allow' modding, whether you explicitly build api support or simply just don't use il2cpp

[rotund token]

i'm surprised out how well some people modded our game with il2cpp

without any support

had half a dozen up within a week

[devout prairie]

so many games where mods have literally kept the games relevant, where otherwise they might not have

[rotund token]

in our no-advertised early access so there were very few players

i was impressed

but yeah definitely going to research/experiment with 0.50 to see what i can do

because i'd like to build the concept of modding into the base game of any new project

[devout prairie]

yeah i mean it's possible.. replacing content is fairly easy.. changing values is often doable.. functionality changes are extremely hard tho but i think there are tools becoming available that try and help with that

[rotund token]

the thing is, even with mono nearly all your game logic is in burst

it's pretty hard to mod

[devout prairie]

that's true, for burst enabled games yeah 😛

[rotund token]

well we are talking about modding in the dots channel

[devout prairie]

yeah of course just making a general comment, as it applies to how modding has been done with unity games for a number of years

but yeah write groups sounds like a great way to potentially do that.. build custom dll's with some custom components/systems and find a way to get them injected into the game

[rotund token]

yep! that's what i'm hoping is possible anyway

it does require developer support not something you can just hack into any dots game

but i really like the idea of making a game highly moddable

[coarse turtle]

yea

i've been a bit busy these past few weeks with work I didn't really have time to push the final update 😦

before releasing it

[safe lintel]

looking forward to when it gets released 🙂

[coarse turtle]

there's also like one thing that irks with nimgui and integrating it with like SRP i wanna figure out because I don't want post processing oversaturating/washing out the UI lool

[safe lintel]

need an alternative for uitoolkit/elements while we wait for 0.50 or whatever on the unity side

funny, i recall looking into ways to make the srp postprocessing affect uielements a while ago

[coarse turtle]

the thing with like Unity UGUI and and UI Toolkit (I think for UI Toolkit) is that, it renders as a separate subpass and where im stuck with is - how do I add a subpass to URP and such... I would prefer post processing not affect the UI cause it really makes things hard to read sometimes - which defeats the whole point of a debugging tool in a way 🤔

[safe lintel]

yeah I can totally understand not wanting visual effects to mess with debug ui, but from some previous experiments I totally wanted some of those things to affect the text in certain cases. anyway for anyone else who may not have seen it(itsjustblank's ui asset in development) - https://forum.unity.com/threads/in-development-nimgui-a-1-draw-call-immediate-mode-gui-for-unity.1171601/ 🙂

[coarse turtle]

yea I definitely get it lol. I might just leave the subpass thing as is and wrap up the release haha. Something I want to tackle next is a custom command buffer so you can record info on a job and then render it out to a pane

[proud lotus]

Can anyone recommend a DOTS tutorial for someone who can just about tread water with standard Unity?

[deft stump]

@proud lotus

I recommend this as a first,
https://www.youtube.com/c/WilmerLinGASchool
for a bit more advanced.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TurboMakesGames

talks to better organize data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIkqP4JbkE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

[rustic rain]

oh man

is it worth to add physics package to 2D?

and apply joints for Z axis

feels bad it adds way too much stuff

[rustic rain]

all right, I'm done with entities for now xD
Will limit myself to Jobs as for now

[rustic rain]

Soooo, any tips on how to gather data for job?
Let's say for simple transform changes

    public struct BackgroundMovementData
    {
        public float3 position;
        public float speed;
        public float offset;
    }
    public struct MoveBackgroundJob : IJobParallelFor
    {
        NativeList<BackgroundMovementData> data;
        public float delta;
        public void Execute(int index)
        {
            BackgroundMovementData curData = data[index];
            curData.position.x -= curData.speed * delta;
            if (curData.offset * -1.5f > curData.position.x)
            {
                curData.position += curData.offset * 3f;
            }
            data[index] = curData;
        }
    }

I need some tip for concept on how to organize data for this approach

[rotund token]

entities groups data for you conveniently 😆

[rustic rain]

yyyep

now I need to figure out how to create input for my job

either create some management head that will store all references

or...

[rotund token]

the truth is, unless you have a really heavy job the cost of gathering then writing backresults will probably be greater than your performance savings in a job

[rustic rain]

eeeh

I just want to keep things in ECS mindset

even without entities

or at least

Data oriented design

OOP makes want to puke sometimes

[rustic rain]

hmm

When you add smth to NativeList

is there a consistent way to get index of newly added smth?

I'm thinking of creating self registering monos like that

private static NativeList<BackgroundMovementData> dataArray;
    private void Awake()
    {
        if (dataArray.IsEmpty) dataArray = new NativeList<BackgroundMovementData>(Allocator.Persistent);

        dataArray.Add(backgroundMovement);
    }

[devout prairie]

i think NativeList should act like a list ( whereas dict or hashmap i think no guarentee of order )

so if you add something to it just assume the index is like:
int index = dataArray.Length-1;

[rustic rain]

yeah, it seems like this

in source as well

but how to interact with it, when mono is destroyed

welp

it does mem cpy

kek

sucks

so hard

can't even use Jobs without entities

[deft stump]

that's false you can use jobs outside of UECS

[rustic rain]

I mean yes, but it's so inconvinient

you either have to recreate your own entities

or use it in certain niche situations

and everything would require some "Head" object to process all children

Can you use burst outside of jobs tho?

[deft stump]

yes

[rustic rain]

Like, define certain helper math functions as burst compile

and that would work?

[deft stump]

yes

read the docs there's a way to do it using function pointers

[rustic rain]

only delegates can be burst compiled?

[deft stump]

yes

[rustic rain]

[BurstCompile]
public class BackgroundMovement : MonoBehaviour
{
    [BurstCompile]
    private static float3 NewPos(float3 curPos, float speed, float offset, float delta)
    {
        curPos.x -= speed * delta;
        if (offset * -1.5f > curPos.x)
        {
            curPos += offset * 3f;
        }
        return curPos;
    }
    private delegate float3 ProccessFloat3With3Floats(float3 x, float a, float b, float c);
    static FunctionPointer<ProccessFloat3With3Floats> mulFunctionPointer;
    static BackgroundMovement()
    {
        mulFunctionPointer = BurstCompiler.CompileFunctionPointer<ProccessFloat3With3Floats>(NewPos);
    }

Sooo, I guess that would work?

I wonder if it's even worth it

to compile such methods

so later to Invoke them with pointers

wellp, it's not kek

simple operations don't profit at all

[deft stump]

you only benefit from burst if your code is "SIMD-able".
from what I see, that's going to be completely scalar, I believe.

here's a vid from unity on how to develop a smell test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpwvXkoFcp8

One Loan Coder dives deep into SIMD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Scb5Mku1g

[rustic rain]

yeah, I watched it

fully

just curious to test things out

[candid epoch]

thanks for looking into it. My assumption was that with those UpdateBefore and UpdateAfter conditions my system should run between the TansformSystemGroup and the Command buffer. Did that to make sure that i can "completely" process certain entities i created this frame.
Took your advice and deleted it but couldn't let it go, so i did some additional digging and debugging. It led me to another system with UpdateBefore and UpdateAfter conditions that forced my command buffer to run before the TransformSystemGroup. After deleting one of the attributes the error is gone and it works. Should i try to set this up in an example project and report it as a bug? my setup was obviously wrong but i think having an error that indicates what the problem is would be better than getting an index exception 🙈

[karmic basin]

I don't know if that's worth a bug report. As like you said it's a user confusion during setup. Due to the stacktrace and looking at the source you can quickly pinpoint the index-out-of-bounds in List error to the updatebefore attribute while the bootstrapper of your world tries to order systems exception so I'd say it's clear enough for an experimental package :p
Though I agree that some error message mentioning ordering conflict could help, because people are expected to explicitly declare them so required to stay organised and/or keep track and that can become a nightmare with hundreds of systems. But you don't need to be explicit everywhere only when dependencies are involved, and at least for now you can use system groups, and so on...

This even calls for some dependency-chain debugger asset tool, until Unity eventually provides one maybe in the far far future 🤔

[candid epoch]

yeah, i'll probably introduce some additional groups to make it less error prone.
been thinking about writing something that generates me a proper diagram of the current system ordering. maybe the issue that i had is a good reason to start implementing this.

just in case anyone runs into the same issue:
all i did was set a break point in ComponentSystemSorte at line 229 and evaluated this expression to find all the systems that couldn't be ordered properly:

Array.FindAll(elements,(ele) => ele.nAfter != -1).Select((ele) => ele.Type.FullName).ToArray()

and then i went through all of them to figure out what breaks my system order

[karmic basin]

yeah some kind of Gantt chart including relationship constraints (like start-to-start, finish-to-start, and so on) would be helpful for complex architectures. 😄

[karmic basin]

even more helpful because immediately actionable, thanks for sharing 👍

[pliant pike]

I don't suppose anyone knows why we cant get DynamicBuffers in EntityQuerys? 😕

[karmic basin]

Works for me

[pliant pike]

really I use tocomponentdataarray and I just get an error 😕

[karmic basin]

Oh I use a chunk job

[pliant pike]

yeah I need to get one in a query outside a job

[karmic basin]

With a ForEach you could

[pliant pike]

You mean then pass them into a native array, because I've done that before

Just wish there was an easier way

[karmic basin]

yeah, could also toentityarray and loop + getbuffer from there, but that's a lot of non-linear lookups

[pliant pike]

Yeah not efficient, I might not use buffers at all 🤔

[rustic rain]

are there even any options besides buffers tho?

[pliant pike]

I might try another component with a unique id to identify the parent

[coarse turtle]

If youre not planning on storing a lot maybe a fixed struct/fixed list?

[rustic rain]

Guys, any idea what is better?
Make GO hybrid, where GO have colliders and solve them (because I have very few colliders with about 1 rigid body total)?
Oooor, use entity physics?

I'm gonna have about 10 simultenious colliders in scene

and 1 rigid body for player

[pliant pike]

Not a lot, but wouldn't I still have to get that in an inefficient way?

[deft stump]

Is keeping a NativeList in Persistent throughout the lifetime of the game a good idea?

and also making it so that it never decreases in size?
I'll just reuse indeces

[pliant pike]

It should be fine I've done it before, that's why they have the persistent allocator after all

[coarse turtle]

Probably, I didn't read the full context so I thought you wanted to keep in ctx of ToComponentDataArray

[deft stump]

how do you handle the size change?
do you not resize it? and just reuse indices?

[pliant pike]

I think I use a combination of clearing the list and reusing indices

or did I remove empty indices that were at the end🤔

[white island]

alright, how does error MayOnlyLiveInBlobStorageViolation: You may only access .tokens by (non-readonly) ref, as it may only live in blob storage. try ref BlobArray<FixedString32> yourVariable = ref yourPropertiesData.tokens
apply to this:

public static BlobbableRawStruct ConvertStruct(ref RawReader.ParsedRawData data)
    {
        return new BlobbableRawStruct
        {
            general_id = data.General.id,
            general_name = FlattenDict<string, string>(data.General.name),
            general_desc = FlattenDict<string, string>(data.General.desc),
            general_texture = data.General.texture,
            general_type = data.General.type,

            property_tokens = data.Properties.tokens,
            property_hardness = data.Properties.hardness,
            property_species_stats = FlattenDict<string, int>(data.Properties.species_stats),
            property_lifecycle = FlattenDict<string, int>(data.Properties.lifecycle),
            property_stats = FlattenDict<string, int>(data.Properties.stats),
            property_custom_props = data.Properties.custom_props,

            behaviours = FlattenBehaviors(data.Behaviors.behaviors),

            anatomy = data.Anatomy
        };
    }

[rustic rain]

I'm assuming dots actually likes that, but
if I make my own collision detection algorithm

is detecting collision per every tick between all colliders

is the way to go

or?

like:

foreach (collider in colliders){
   foreach(otherCollider in colliders){
        checkcollision(collider, otherCollider);

}

maybe there's any other smart ways about it?

since threading first loop is possible

but second is not

[worn valley]

That is a brute force way and physics systems will do a lot more to make it more efficient

Like checking bounding boxes first. Look up broad sweep and narrow sweep

[rustic rain]

well yeah, optimisations and etc

aabb

but besides that?

I guess the other way to do it smart is make

region groups

so, collisions only checked inside

any other solutions tho?

[worn valley]

There is lots of articles on physics best practices out there. DOTS is a bit better cause you just have more processing power but the core principles are all the same

[deft stump]

just to be sure, there's no 2D DOTS phsyics yet right?

[rustic rain]

there's

it's super old

I'm not even sure if it's capable to detect collisions itself

but

it's capable of doing casts

kek

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.2d.entities.physics@0.2/manual/Conversion.html

here manual

[cunning perch]

Is Burst a Unity only thing? It seems like such a crazy good feature for all game engines not just Unity. Are there no other libraries that take bytecode to highly optimized native code

[rustic rain]

it's C# so

I doubt there's much to stop you from using it outside unity

[cunning perch]

oh that's nice. I thought it was a Unity only thing

can't seem to find it anyone online without it mentioning Unity. I guess Unity owns the source code then even though it's just c#?

[rustic rain]

source is right there

in packages folder

[cunning perch]

well, the license would stop me from using it outside of unity... Exercise of the license granted herein is permitted as long as it is in connection with the authoring and/or distribution of applications, software, or other content under a valid Unity content authoring and rendering engine software license (“Engine License”).

[rustic rain]

oh well

I guess my words only apply to "underground modding world"

kek

hmm, if I implement a system group and put a bunch of systems in it

does it mean that it'll work as sync point?

[deft stump]

it's a unity only thing

[karmic basin]

in itself, no. The group will effectively become a sync point if one of these systems do a structural change.

other than that a group is just a convenient way to ... group systems together

[rustic rain]

any idea on how to launch unity samples?

I donwloaded exact version of editor

it required

[karmic basin]

yeah make sure yo uuse same version as them

[rustic rain]

started sample

[karmic basin]

ah

[rustic rain]

loaded scene

it has 2 subscenes, both enclosed

I try to run in editor

I get red errors on update

hm

I think when they created it

they used older entities version yet

they didn't mention version in packages manifest

because they installed them all by dependency

[karmic basin]

Tiny has its own manual on a google drive, I would check it for any special requirements

But can't help you more, I didnt read it ^^

[rustic rain]

there's nothing

doubt they want me to build game every time to run it

omegalul

[rustic rain]

missile and player
I am really missing a point, how collision filters are determined for entity when you don't use authoring component

but rely on conversion system to convert GO component

I'm guessing it uses transform layer from GO

from here

But then how it determines what it collides with

I checked player and missile queries for filter values on their colliders

and they are different

here whole missile prefab

here Player

their authoring components have nothing to do with colliders

[karmic basin]

Unity provides some default conversion for legacy components

I would need to check, didn't have the chance to before 🤔

[rustic rain]

I mean, yeah it converts

but how does it get different collision filters

if it's not defined anywhere

[karmic basin]

I assume they at least init with CollisionFilter.Default maybe

aaah found it with a quick search 😛

[rustic rain]

??

[rustic rain]

so, how does it get it?

[karmic basin]

from the gameobject layers

[rustic rain]

collideswith

I mean

oh wait

gameobject layers have collides with?

[karmic basin]

nah i asume the helper method checks layer matrix from settings

so its cehcked 1 on 1

hence the loop I assume

[rustic rain]

but, collideswith on my 2 entities is different

[karmic basin]

don't take anything I say for granted, I'm just discovering it right here right now with you :p

[karmic basin]

well it's a bitmask right ? So would need to be built upon the exact same combination of layers to be exactly the same

[rustic rain]

I am so lost

how it's determined by default?

collides with everything?

[karmic basin]

nah according to my screenshot it loops over every layer from the legacy collision matrix (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LayerBasedCollision.html). And if they can collide, it adds the layer to the bitmask

Again, disclaimer, all I say are guesses from the high-level methods names, I didnt dig into it. But that's how I would naively start with

it loops over every layer
More like "checks current layer with every other one"

[rustic rain]

ooooh

that link you said

pointed me to this

[karmic basin]

yes, that's the layer collision matrix

[rustic rain]

in project settings

[karmic basin]

ok my bad assumed you knew that

[rustic rain]

weird, if that's not assigned

thing is

this sample from unity

performs collisions like this:

                    if (physicsWorld.OverlapCollider(col
,
                        out OverlapColliderHit hit))
                    {
                        wasPlayerHit = true;

                        // stop everything
                        EntityManager.SetComponentData(gameStateEntity, new GameState
                        {
                            Value = GameStates.Start
                        });
                    }

for all queries

so, if Player collides with just everything

that is game over

yet, when player shoots smth

he is not colliding

[karmic basin]

you assume everything but depends on the collision filter. Did you check what it ?

[karmic basin]

THis looks like player specific yeah, so I assume there's another code for other collisions

[rustic rain]

here missile hit system

[karmic basin]

But not sure I understand what you're looking for

[rustic rain]

it only checks whether it collides or not

not checking if it's collides with smth it wants

[deft stump]

It probably has a bit operation inside the OverlapCollider method.
to filter out the hits

[karmic basin]

oh yeah so some kind of Asteroids game. Yeah in this kind of games any hit is instant death usually 😛

[rustic rain]

yeah, based on filter of collider

which is not defined at all

it seems

[karmic basin]

It retrieves it from the Collider blob itself

[rustic rain]

yeah, and I read those values through debug

[karmic basin]

so we're back to where we were with conversion for legacy components, or from the new Physics components if exist

[karmic basin]

ok so still confused why values would differ ?

[rustic rain]

not really

I'm confused if they have any value at all

why even belong to layer

if everything collides with everything

most annoying part is that I'm unable to play game in editor lol

to test things out with my changes

[karmic basin]

IIRC on DOTS physics, everything has to want to collide with everything for a collision to happen

it's a consent-based relationship, like people in real life (lol)

everything has to want to collide with everything
I meant every entity involved in the pair

damn I'm tired

[river meteor]

anyone have a problem with installing the packages and getting compilation errors based on collections?

I'm thinking one of my packages is too far current or something idk

[coarse turtle]

yea downgrade to the version of collections that is supported by entities

1.1.0 release isn't compatible yet

[rustic rain]

collections must 0.15

[river meteor]

thank you ^_^

[rustic rain]

yep yep yep

that thing I was afraid of

my entitiy collides with itself

        Entities
            .WithAll<PlayerTag>()
            .ForEach((Entity playerEntity, ref PhysicsColliderBlob collider, in Translation translation, in Rotation rotation) =>
            {
                var col = new OverlapColliderInput
                {
                    Collider = collider.Collider,
                    Transform = new PhysicsTransform(translation.Value, rotation.Value),
                    Filter = collider.Collider.Value.Filter
                };
                if (physicsWorld.OverlapCollider(col, out OverlapColliderHit hit))
                {

                    UnityEngine.Debug.Log("Collides" + playerEntity.Index);
                    UnityEngine.Debug.Log("With" + hit.Entity.Index);
                }
            }).Run();

Debug shows same entities

[white island]

What’s going on here?

[coarse turtle]

are you using blob builder to build your blob struct?

would recommend looking at the BlobificationTests in the Unity.Entities package for reference

[white island]

Hmm okay I’ll deal with that after work

Then I can show my whole code

[river meteor]

i feel like installation order is such a puzzle box for these packages

so i'm not having the collections issue anymore but now i have this

nvm disregard. had to reboot after reinstalling burst

[karmic basin]

Which layers are involved in the CollisionFilter ? Filter = collider.Collider.Value.Filter

[rustic rain]

it's fine, I figured how to assign layers

but it can be done only through Unity project settings

[karmic basin]

ok nice

layer collsiion matrix would be for legacy physics components

can't build CollisionFilter at runtime and feed that ?

works for 3d but can't tell for 2d, never tried

[rustic rain]

can, but that's like unsafe

since you have to change collider through pointer

and

you it's way harder to find out whether you need new collider

or you can use same as others

[karmic basin]

yeah that's the way for now. Can also cache physics shapes and swap them at runtime if you prefer

[rustic rain]

it's super simple for me

it's just that broken sample tilted me hard

[karmic basin]

:p

[rustic rain]

and I couldn't see through simple stuff

2d is way way easier than 3d ngl

[karmic basin]

oh great. I still feel like it's a hassle to use and haven't enough time to do everything I want with 3d sooooo... not gonna touch 2d for a looong time 🙂

[rustic rain]

actually the reason I decided to bail on 3d is because hybrid workflow is painful

[karmic basin]

yeah sure more than we would like 😓

[river meteor]

does anyone have a good holistic intro to dots tutorial they generally recommend?

[rustic rain]

moetsi has great tutorial

got me hooked very quickly

[river meteor]

i cannot find moetsi on youtube

[rustic rain]

it's text guide

https://dots-tutorial.moetsi.com/

[river meteor]

oh ok i'll check it out

i'm very much a visual learner so i'll check out unity's pong tutorial and go from there

[white island]

Skyrbunny does not understand Blobs

[rustic rain]

Is it a specific package that makes building normally (through File menu) impossible? Anyone knows?

[rotund token]

subsystems subscenes don't build if you use the regular file/build menu

[rustic rain]

subscenes

?

[rotund token]

yep

subscenes

[rustic rain]

all right, that's fine for now

I don't use them at this point at all xD

maybe I should

[rotund token]

if you happen to have subscenes already built you can actually still use the file/build menu and just past them into the streamingassets folder

and it runs fine

[rustic rain]

Do you have any idea about how unity manages resources with subscenes?

I'm thinking of using subscene to quick reset level

[rotund token]

you can just unload/reload the subscene

and it would be a clean reset

[rustic rain]

yeah

so, it's not touching any loaded in subscene resources I assume?

if let's say I'll have a lot of heavy unique to this subscene resources

[rotund token]

subscenes are just a giant chunk of binary data, it's very fast to load/unload

[rustic rain]

Is there any sort of marker btw

to destroy certain object in subscene without conversion?

for sake of keeping designing sane

(having dummy empty go for folders)

yet, in runtime I don't want them at all

[rotund token]

from memory, every entity from a subscene has a component that links it to the specific subscene

[rustic rain]

since they create LTW components

[rotund token]

cant remember the name, cooking dinner otherwise i'd look it up

[rustic rain]

well what I want is to destroy entity completely

during conversion

so all child entities

will be independant

upon conversion

basically, don't even create entity

just destroy GO

releasing all children

to root

[rotund token]

you can control exactly what gets converted

also there's a top conversion component

that will stop any child from this point on converting

[rustic rain]

I want vice versa, convert children

not parent

kind of like this

I don't want Ground to be entity

only Ground Close

[rotund token]

no reason you can't have a conversion system that de-parents them before conversion

never really considered the need to try this though so no idea what pitfalls you might run into

any particular reason you can't have ground as an entity?

[rustic rain]

it messes with translation component

creates a need in sync point

since entitiy is considered child

and is now binded to it through several systems

that adjust local to world position

[rotund token]

are you changing the 'ground' or just the 'ground close', 'ground close (1)' etc?

[rustic rain]

ground close

they need to be changed as individuals

[rustic rain]

what GroupIndex stands for in collision filters?

[rotund token]

so what's the problem then?

if you only change the children and never the parent it works as is, like it doesn't have a parent

[rustic rain]

still creates unwanted effects

with niche interactions, like spawning new outside of that parent

and creates relying on LTW component

instead of Translation/Rotation

if that parent is not 0,0,0

[rotund token]

i'd argue you should always rely on ltw for world space

[rustic rain]

does LTW exist on everything tho?

[rotund token]

should be on anything that has a translation, rotation or scale as unity adds it

[rustic rain]

Hmm
Weird thing

I have 2 different colliders

when my player collides with any of them

I run that code

            var interactableData = GetComponentDataFromEntity<InteractableEnvironmentComponent>(true);
            InteractableEnvironmentComponent data = interactableData[hit.Entity];
EntityManager.RemoveComponent<PhysicsColliderBlob>(hit.Entity);

OverlapColliderHit hit

so

Intended and expected result: that entity no more collides as it has no collider

but existing result is that none of those 2 entities collide anymore

not just one that collided

ok it's actually entity that doesn't spawn with collider at all for some reason

but why, they are identical. Yet no collider on tree2

[safe lintel]

Does unity physics even support 2d colliders officially?

just tested, tbh dont think 2d conversion is even supported, and what you get might just be coincidental for the one collider

[river meteor]

question: i've seen a couple tutorials at different time points, and it seems like most tutorials use some kind of hybrid ECS system. Is there any means to just fully develop in ECS and build a scene of entities, or is some hybridization required? like creating a scene with gameobjects and adding icomponentdata components and entity converters

(if anyone has a really good most-modern tutorial for dots that'd be great)

[haughty rampart]

unity doubled down on a hybrid approach for 0.50 and 1.0 release. they might be considering pure dots in the future, but not in the foreseeable future

[safe lintel]

to a certain degree you cant escape "hybrid" but what that means for each 3rd party tutorial probably varies

[river meteor]

oh ok

i imagine you can do hybrid if you're doing a purely procedural game? but as long as the hybrid approach is the standard that's what i care about

i just wanna make sure i'm learning it the correct way

just looking for the truest-to-intention instruction

[haughty rampart]

then you should prob wait for unity to release their sample projects. which they will after 1.0 released

[safe lintel]

just keep an open mind as there are many different approaches and at this point unity might not even know what that best approach is

[rustic rain]

there's 2d physics package

[vagrant lotus]

the wut

huh

[rustic rain]

working with it rn

it's bare bones

the only thing I use are collision detection

lul

there's built in gravity, but that's it

[river meteor]

well i'm not waiting lol. i meant the most standard as of now

getting started on a project that's going to rely on ECS

[safe lintel]

@rustic rain oh, project tiny?

[rustic rain]

not really

I just installed 2d package

works fine with the rest of dots

as standalone

it's basically same 3d physics

but way less developped

all same fields and etc

[coarse turtle]

Entities2D?

[rustic rain]

so it's kind of easy to use if you have experience with 3d physics package

no

physics

I use normal 3d entities

[coarse turtle]

oh

[river meteor]

but yeah do any of yall have recommendations for video resources?

i was poking around the unity pong tutorial lastnight. that's why i was surprised to see the hybrid approach. but makes sense now that you guys clarified that

[haughty rampart]

idk. maybe code monkey a bit and turbo makes games. but all are rather :7 outdated or not following good conventions

but that's true for pretty much all dots videos

[vagrant lotus]

alternatively, go the tinker around route (but this takes a lot of time)

[deft stump]

Reusing this answer from before

I recommend this as a first,
https://www.youtube.com/c/WilmerLinGASchool
for a bit more advanced.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TurboMakesGames

talks to better organize data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIkqP4JbkE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

[river meteor]

thank you much ^_^

question!

so this portion of the gdc 19 talk. I watched this a while ago but looking now, is it possible to use the disposable closure type syntax for this

[haughty rampart]

no

[river meteor]

using (NativeArray<Entity> bullets = new NativeArray<Entity>(totalAmount, Allocator.Temp))
{
  // bullet logic here
}

oh rip, that'd be handy

[haughty rampart]

you can try but it's gonna throw errors because in a using block you are not allowed to change the contents of the 'captured' variable

so that's something that will never be available

[river meteor]

oh i didn't realize that

[haughty rampart]

also it's actually something you wouldn't want to use in DOTS anyway because dots is performance oriented

and using is pretty much just fancy for putting try finally around your code

[rustic rain]

is sprite renderer the only thing for drawing simple 2D?

I'm wondering how to make animation

without any structural changes

my bet is I need shared component for sprite sheet
but then, how to draw it

Actually

more like

[haughty rampart]

why don't you just use a plane and render your sprite on that quad with 3d

[rustic rain]

how to collect that data

I'm more confused about how to actually draw a sprite

without using material per frame

I want to use simple sprite default material for all sprites

as example for now

[coarse turtle]

i just store them in managed component data

[rustic rain]

and then?

[coarse turtle]

for sprite sheet animation, SpriteRenderer2D regenerates the vertices iirc

[haughty rampart]

make a flipbook shader and apply it to the quad

[rustic rain]

flipboard shader?

[coarse turtle]

if your sprite is all the same size per tile, then you can just generate a regular quad and shift the uvs

[rustic rain]

ok, that's the start

so fliipbook is just going through array of UVs

??

[coarse turtle]

which is what MindStyler is pretty much saying with the flipbook shader

[rustic rain]

and picks correct sprite from texture?

[coarse turtle]

yea

you can also just do math to offset it instead of

reading an array of uvs

if you're generating a quad, and don't want to regenerate the mesh, then doing math to offset the uvs can be better

[rustic rain]

I'm in 2d space here, so using quad is best practice I think

thing is

I kind of want to make at least some what universal system

not the one that only applies to spritesheets

that are exact way I hardcode in shader

[coarse turtle]

whatever way works

I just do math 🤷

figure out your needs/use cases first before you roll out a generic system that works for anything imo

[rustic rain]

my need is that I want to pass either an array of sprites

to my shared component

or smth very similiar to it

and expect system to just switch them through time

[coarse turtle]

yea i have something similar

[rustic rain]

so you do all your work in shader?

[coarse turtle]

it's a mix

shader does most of the heavy lifting, dots side just passes the index

[rustic rain]

index of current sprite to use?

[coarse turtle]

yea

i don't keep an array of sprites

just a single spritesheet

for sprites with varying sizes (cause of packing), I have a different method of handling it

which is typically just generating all of the unique meshes and then submeshing them. I switch the index of which submesh I want to render because it has the correct uvs I need to render the correct sprite in the animation

it does mean that i upload like a few hundred vertices to the gpu since all the uvs are packed together

instead of uploading 4 vertices

[rustic rain]

ok I think I got an idea

I'll keep array of UVs on component

along with shared component for spritesheet itself

and then just collect them all to draw as single batch

assuming jobs has a built in job per sharedcomponent

[safe lintel]

@river meteor if you use the Temp allocation inside a job you dont need to dispose it, its done automatically

[rustic rain]

How to create an ISharedComponentData with Materail as field?

public struct AnimatedSpritesheet : ISharedComponentData, IEquatable<Material>
{
    public Material material;
    public float2 wh;

    public bool Equals(Material other)
    {
        return other == material;
    }
}

Editor yelled on me for not using Iquatable

so I kind of tried this with blind eyes

is that correct what I did here?

[rotund token]

Should be equitable with itself

<AnimatedSpriteSheet>

[rustic rain]

yeah, I see

public struct AnimatedSpritesheet : ISharedComponentData, IEquatable<AnimatedSpritesheet>
{
    public Material material;
    public float2 wh;

    public bool Equals(AnimatedSpritesheet other)
    {
        return other.material.Equals(material) && other.wh.Equals(wh);
    }
}

I guess that would work

you must also override GetHashCode()

lul

ok, so how do I do that? any tips?

I mean, how to implement hashcode method

all right

looks like VS got me covered

with it's auto generator

[river meteor]

hey question. adding convert to entity script with create and destroy just destroys the gameobject but i don't see the object in the scene anymore

is there like an ECS specific rendering component?

[devout prairie]

i think two possibilities:
1 - You don't have Hybrid renderer installed
2 - The object uses skinned mesh renderer or some other component which doesn't convert easily

[river meteor]

i figured it out, thank you!

i'm using URP so had to enable hybrid renderer v2

[river meteor]

another question: what is the distinction between creating a system that inherist systembase and jobcomponentsystem

because when i go to the context menu i can see ECS->System and it creates a template with systembase

oh nvm just saw one returns a jobhandle and systembase returns void

[haughty rampart]

jobcomponentsystem is looooooooong deprecated

[river meteor]

fudge

oh ok

so systembase is the correct implementation? and i just don't bother returning the handle?

[haughty rampart]

yes. system base is the ONLY correct class.

[river meteor]

ok glad i asked

unity's 2019 tutorial

[haughty rampart]

in a newer version you can also use ISystem then

[river meteor]

oh, makes sense. so you can create your own system heirarchy with base implementations, and systems only require OnUpdate to be defined anyway

[haughty rampart]

no. ISystem will let you burst the system code itself

[river meteor]

ohhhhhhh

do you need [AlwaysSynchronizeSystem] for any system that is going to operate on player input?

or any main thread dependency

[haughty rampart]

no. i never use alwayssynchronizesystem

[river meteor]

oh ok

.Run is sufficient?

[haughty rampart]

i never use run. then it's just like calling a method. gets executed instantly. then what's the point of the job?

well......there are a few tiny systems that use .run() in my projects. but literally only systems that update meshes

and only the setting of the new data is using .run()

but i mean i don't know your exact code / use case

[river meteor]

i'm watching the unity dots pong tutorial and they have a system that's taking the player input and modifying component data that gets passed to other jobs

Entities.ForEach((ref PaddleMovementData moveData, in PaddleInputData inputData) =>
{
    moveData.direction = 0;
    moveData.direction += Input.GetKey(inputData.upKey) ? 1 : 0;
    moveData.direction -= Input.GetKey(inputData.downKey) ? 1 : 0;
}).Run();

i assume it's just for demonstration purposes. like you could have a regular script do this well enough i assume? but how would you add it to an entity

i do have a question about this though. since this tutorial is obv out of date, it was having me schedule this job with the inputDeps of OnUpdate as the passed in job handle. in this case is it correct to just put default instead?

protected override void OnUpdate()
{
    float deltaTime = Time.DeltaTime;
    float yBound = 3;

    JobHandle myJob = Entities.ForEach((ref Translation trans, in PaddleMovementData data) =>
    {
        trans.Value.y = math.clamp(trans.Value.y + (data.speed * data.direction * deltaTime), -yBound, yBound);

    }).Schedule(default);
}

i assume the dependencies are just a way to chain a sequence of jobs to avoid race conditions, so default would just be a way of saying "i don't care"

[safe lintel]

schedule using Dependency not default

[river meteor]

oh ok. that's just whatever the current dependency is for the system itself?

[safe lintel]

or in your code Schedule(myJob);

[river meteor]

you want the job to schedule itself as a dependency?

[safe lintel]

actually good point, generally I always go by Dependency = job.Schedule(Dependency)

but I dont think using default is correct, you can omit putting a jobhandle in the schedule but I think under the hood it just uses the system's Dependency handle

[river meteor]

oh i didn't realize

i thought i had a red line

i will leave it blank then unless it actually has a depenency

[haughty rampart]

do not put anything inside Schedule() when using SystemBase

[river meteor]

thank you =3

[haughty rampart]

also you don't need to save Entities.Foreach() into a jobhandle

[river meteor]

yeah i omitted that already

[safe lintel]

you definitely need to touch upon using Dependency in systembase at times

[river meteor]

BUT. if i were running like sequential jobs in a system, i would pass them ass dependencies to the scheduler in that instance right?

[haughty rampart]

no

just leave it blank

[river meteor]

then how would i ensure that jobs run sequentially?

[haughty rampart]

entities.foreach that come after a previous entities.foreach get passed the Dependency property automatically so that already ensures they run sequentially. you don't need to explicitly pass it

[river meteor]

is that in the documentation somewhere?

that's super cool if that's the case

[haughty rampart]

should be. i don't know the whole documentation by heart though

if you need to run a WHOLE system after another though, you need to add the [UpdateAfter()] attribute or [UpdateBefore()]

[safe lintel]

anyway i totally disagree with Mindstyler, you will definitely need to use it for any time you use EntityCommandBuffer's for example, need to pass in the jobhandle in AddJobHandleForProducer

[haughty rampart]

that is correct. but we were never talking about ECB's

[river meteor]

so how would i allow jobs on entities to run non-concurrently?

if it's enforced by default

would i just need separate systems

non-concurrently per-entity i mean

[haughty rampart]

I'm not quite getting your question

[river meteor]

you're saying if i schedule two jobs in one system, they automatically set the dependency variable which means there's no possibility of race conditions

IF i wanted to allow them to run at fastest speed even in competition with one another, how would i do that

[safe lintel]

IF i wanted to allow them to run at fastest speed even in competition with one another what do you mean by this?

[river meteor]

so say i have one entity, it has two jobs to do. and i want them to finish as fast as possible. i want to schedule them both and say i have two threads available, I want both of those jobs to be able to run on those threads concurrently

would that require two systems, since it seems like scheduling them in one system automatically lists the previously scheduled job as a dependency

[haughty rampart]

i mean of course you would use 2 different systems for that. because these 2 jobs stand in no correlation to one another

some OOP principles still apply even with ecs. like the speration of concern. don't write monoliths in OOP and don't write monolithic systems in ECS that do more than one thing

[river meteor]

oh yeah i think that clicks. like if you had one struct that two jobs modified different aspects of, it probably makes more sense that that single struct should be two structs

[woven arch]

What's the status of DOTS at the moment? I haven't been keeping up with Unity for the past 2 years.

[haughty rampart]

0.50 will be released in the next few weeks and 1.0 at the end of this year

[woven arch]

Okay. I wonder if it's ready for real projects yet, or if they expect a lot of breaking changes.

[safe lintel]

right now its the same as it was when you left it @woven arch

[haughty rampart]

there will be a few but not all that many

[woven arch]

Alright, thanks.

[safe lintel]

@river meteor for your question you dont need two systems, this is where you can just use dependencies explicitly

[river meteor]

i'm extra confused now

i would use dependencies explicitly to say they AREN'T dependent?

[safe lintel]

basically you want to parallelize two jobs for your scenario right?

[haughty rampart]

i would still highly encourage 2 systems

because logic wise that makes much more sense

[safe lintel]

not necessarily

[river meteor]

yeah that does make sense

[safe lintel]

    public class TestScheduleSystem : SystemBase
    {
        protected override void OnUpdate()
        {
            var up = new float3(0, 1, 0);
            var time = (float)Time.ElapsedTime;
            var deltaTime = Time.DeltaTime;
            Entities.WithName("RotateJob").ForEach((Entity entity, ref Rotation data) =>
            {
                data.Value = quaternion.EulerXYZ(data.Value.value.y, data.Value.value.x, data.Value.value.z);
            }).Schedule();
            
            Entities.WithName("TranslateJob").ForEach((Entity entity, ref Translation data) =>
            {
                data.Value += up * deltaTime * time;
            }).Schedule();
            
            
            var handle = Entities.WithName("RotateJob2").ForEach((Entity entity, ref Rotation data) =>
            {
                data.Value = quaternion.EulerXYZ(data.Value.value.y, data.Value.value.x, data.Value.value.z);
            }).Schedule(Dependency);
            
            var handleB = Entities.WithName("TranslateJob2").ForEach((Entity entity, ref Translation data) =>
            {
                data.Value += up * deltaTime * time;
            }).Schedule(Dependency);
            
            Dependency = JobHandle.CombineDependencies(handle, handleB);
        }
    }

first two will be scheduled one after another, but the second two wont be

[coarse turtle]

could just do 2 jobs, don't really see a need for another system 🤷 (but I guess ymmv with scale)

[safe lintel]

little hard to tell but the arrows show the job scheduling

[river meteor]

i see

so offset and rotate are two jobs in one system?

with no explicit dependencies?

[safe lintel]

if you have a another job that requires the output of both prior jobs, it can make sense to do this

[river meteor]

why

[haughty rampart]

no you'd use another system and [UpdateAfter]

[river meteor]

if the system sequentializes them

yeah that seems more clear

i do appreciate both explanations though because it shows the capabilities as well as best practice

[haughty rampart]

best practice that unity recommends is definitely multiple systems

[safe lintel]

for the most part if its unrelated id use different systems, but there are times when you dont want to

[haughty rampart]

yes there are times, but not that often. and he's just now learning dots.

[river meteor]

what are the use cases for creating explicit authoring components vs just using the attribute?

[haughty rampart]

e.g. if you have to do some conversions or calculations. [GenerateAuthoringComponent] pretty much just slaps the struct as is on the entity.

[river meteor]

oh gotcha

[river meteor]

watching another tutorial now, trying to learn about instantiating prefabs, is "ComponentSystem" another one of those types i shouldn't utilize?

[river meteor]

is this in the entity debugger btw? i don't see that interface

[haughty rampart]

component system is also loooong deprecated

[haughty rampart]

no that's in the profiler

[river meteor]

oh ok

so when i use this code and try to use it to spawn a prefab that i have in a PrefabEntityComponent I created, i get an error:

protected override void OnUpdate()
{
    _spawnTimer -= Time.DeltaTime;
    if (_spawnTimer <= 0f)
    {
        _spawnTimer = 0.01f;
        Entities.ForEach((ref PrefabEntityComponent prefabEntityComponent) =>
        {
            Entity spawnedEntity = EntityManager.Instantiate(prefabEntityComponent.prefabEntity);
            EntityManager.SetComponentData(spawnedEntity,
                new Translation() { Value = new float3(_random.NextFloat(-5f, 5f), 10, _random.NextFloat(-5f, 5f)) });
        }).Schedule();
    }
}

EntitySpawnerSystem.cs(19,9): error DC0002: Entities.ForEach Lambda expression invokes 'get_EntityManager' on a EntitySpawnerSystem which is a reference type. This is only allowed with .WithoutBurst() and .Run().```

should i only be instantiating entities on the main thread?

oh thank god. found a recent tutorial that mentions entity creation has to happen on the main thread and that's what you were talking about before with entity command buffers?

thank you guys for all the help btw! I really appreciate the instantaneous feedback

[safe lintel]

yeah ecb's defer all commands until the system you create them from plays them back, the entities docs is pretty good at explaining their usage

[river meteor]

is there good boilerplate out there for say, spawning X prefabs at a button press?

[safe lintel]

assuming you figured out the code above, not much more to it

[river meteor]

oh ok perfect

[frail hare]

Hello, I'm using Entity Component System (if wrong channel I can relocate this, DOTS seemed closest to ECS) and setting up a character with a HitCollision component added to it, but I'm getting this error still. Something isn't recognizing the component I'm adding to the character, but I'm not sure where the disconnect is as it matches the other pre-made character with the same components. I have the error attached if anyone knows where to look or any advice for it

[river meteor]

i don't see this interface in the profiler o.o

[haughty rampart]

you have to zoom in

[frail hare]

It looks like a simple fix to just add the component it refers to, but it's already there. The HitCollision component is there as well as the collision data prefab that it references. The model has different versions of itself, one of which is dedicated as the HitCollision version where each limb has its own capsule collider then it's plugged into the main character; this is the prefab that is being called that is not being recognized where this error comes from. Because it's setup and applied though, i'm not sure where the disconnect is

[river meteor]

say i want to just be spawning a bunch of capsules consecutively with ECS, what's a reasonable number?

I thought it was going to be like tens of thousands before i got sub 60 fps but it's like 1.5k-2k

they're just capsules with physics bodies on them

this is 1.5k. anything more than this tends to start showing problems

[rustic rain]

It's approach of handling those capsules that matters
In other words with dots power you should expect about hundreds of thousands of objects without problems, depending on what they do

[remote crater]

Turns out leading the target is challenging in DOTS/ECS: https://youtu.be/Zjy9tTX8AVc

[rustic rain]

leading the target? you mean shooting at crosshair?

[rustic rain]

Is there a job type to go through all instances of SharedComponentData?

So instead of going through entities

that have this type of component

I go through each chunk of that component data

for each unique instance that have entities let's say

[rotund token]

thats just how IJobEntityBatch works by default

it gives you each chunk

it's up to you to iterate each entity

[rustic rain]

I'm just trying to figure out here how to do instanced drawing

so far each material aka ISharedComponent

requires different DrawInstanced call

thus different batch

hmmm

how do I declare what chunks to process tho?

oh I see

query

wait a second, that's not it

it's going through batches of component

but how do I know those batches are for separate materials?

oh well

getting sharedcomponent data require entity manager

does it mean, no burst/parallel?

[rustic rain]

ok, weird stuff

I'm not certain, why this job is called not in main thread?

well

I added System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId

in Debug log

and they are same

in both job and OnUpdate()

looks like main thread is long gone in systems xD

that's sad ngl

[haughty rampart]

wdym? if the job and OnUpdate() have the same thread id then the job runs on the main thread

[rustic rain]

is LocalToWorld component a matrix4x4 that is ready to get drawn (Besides potentially wrong scaling)?

[rustic rain]

yeah, but I can't acess any material property

and it errors me saying I'm not on main thread

and since index is 1

not 0

I assume that's true

ooor

[haughty rampart]

hmmm. i'll look into that

[rustic rain]

that just means material was created on another thread

[haughty rampart]

it is a matrix4x4 you can use

[rustic rain]

which was the case for me some time ago

[haughty rampart]

i see. well i'm not too sure what is and isn't happening here unfortunately.

[rustic rain]

it's fine

not that it's very important

just helpful to know

[haughty rampart]

i do know however that you can simplyfy the job initialization and VS also tells you to XD

[rustic rain]

ugh, I need to process each shared component separately

as those are different materials and I only need to draw them once

[haughty rampart]

also, you'll probably get stuck at some point if you pass the entity manager around. rather use ecb's

[rustic rain]

as for now I'm simply trying to make proof of concept

as in make it work one way or another

then I will get to making it run nicer

is there an easy conversion between native array and normal array?

oh yeah, there is

[coarse turtle]

if you're okay with getting a pointer to the normal array you can feed the data from there to the native array

[rustic rain]

I just need arrays for Graphics API

[coarse turtle]

NativeArrayUnsafeUtility.ConvertExistingDataToNativeArray <- the API to do it

[rustic rain]

doubt it knows how to work with native enumerables

[coarse turtle]

fixed (void* ptr = managed_array)
{
  m_Native = NativeArrayUnsafeUtility.ConvertExistingDataToNativeArray<T>(ptr, managed_array.Length, Allocator.None);
}

something like this

might need to set up some atomic safety handles i forget if unity will complain if the native array doesn't have it in the editor

[rustic rain]

Is there a way to let job structs contain reference types?

    public struct SpritesheetAnimationJob : IJobEntityBatch
    {
        [ReadOnly] public ComponentTypeHandle<LocalToWorld> matrixHandle;
        [ReadOnly] public ComponentTypeHandle<AnimatorSpritesheetComponent> animatorHandle;
        [ReadOnly] public SharedComponentTypeHandle<AnimatedSpritesheet> spriteSheetHandle;
        public EntityManager entityManager;
        public Mesh mesh;
        public void Execute(ArchetypeChunk batchInChunk, int batchIndex)
        {
            var matrices = batchInChunk.GetNativeArray(matrixHandle);
            var animators = batchInChunk.GetNativeArray(animatorHandle);
            var spriteSheet = batchInChunk.GetSharedComponentData(spriteSheetHandle, entityManager);

            MaterialPropertyBlock mtb = new MaterialPropertyBlock();
            float[] indexes = new float[matrices.Length];
            Matrix4x4[] matrixArray = new Matrix4x4[matrices.Length];
            for (int i = 0; i < matrices.Length; i++)
            {
                indexes[i] = animators[i].currentIndex;
                matrixArray[i] = matrices[i].Value;
            }
            mtb.SetFloatArray("_CutData", indexes);
            Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced(mesh, 0, spriteSheet.material, matrixArray, matrices.Length, mtb);
        }
    }

Here the job I'm trying to run

[river meteor]

this is the system and component I have set up for my spawning system. If I go over 1500 the frames start to get sub 60. could someone help me figure out what i might be doing wrong?
https://paste.myst.rs/a5cwsw0b

[rustic rain]

so what prefab looks like?

[river meteor]

just a capsule with these components

[rustic rain]

why shape and collider together?

use one or another

[river meteor]

didn't even notice that tbh. remove

[rustic rain]

I wonder if you had 2 colliders on every entitiy xD

[river meteor]

but even that would reduce the efficiency by half, not by a factor of 100 or 1000

i should be able to spawn hundreds of thousands no?

[rustic rain]

why do you think by half

what if having 2 colliders

creates a huge loop of collision events

that all other systems have to go through

[river meteor]

oh true

and if they're all close oct tree optimization won't matter

[rustic rain]

I still wonder

if it actually does it

[river meteor]

2500 works

lets try 25k

[deft stump]

????
What?
Last i check convert to entity is able to convert Mono colliders to Physics shape

[river meteor]

he's talking about adding a capsule collider and a physics shape

[rustic rain]

he had both

[river meteor]

which i did on accident

[rustic rain]

I really have no idea how it'll behave

kek

[river meteor]

so it's better

but nowhere near dots-tier

[rustic rain]

what is your bottleneck?

renderer or cpu?

[rustic rain]

sorry I have no idea how profiler works in unity

I just mean

if it's renderer

that might mean your batcher is not working

[river meteor]

which is confirmed and fixed how? o.o

[rustic rain]

it's just checkboxes to check

SPR batcher

and that you are using V2

hybrid renderer

[river meteor]

i am using v2

[rustic rain]

btw, just try to remove renderer component

[rustic rain]

and see if unrendered entities eat as much

[river meteor]

where is the spr batcher checkpoint

its checked off

[rustic rain]

supposed to be checked on

for hybrid renderer

[river meteor]

.__.

[rustic rain]

as far as I remember

[river meteor]

it contains a check mark inside the box that is used for check marks

yeah i'm not sure

is there anything in my actual logic that would incorrectly set up the spawning?

i don't think my project is configured poorly

[coarse turtle]

is leak detection turn on fully? 🤔

[river meteor]

how do i check to see if i turned leak detection on fully

[rustic rain]

just go and look what is eating your perfomance

[rustic rain]

jobs tab on top of unity window

[river meteor]

just set to on

[rustic rain]

ArgumentException: DrawSpritesheetsSystem+SpritesheetAnimationJob+JobResult used in native collection is not blittable, not primitive, or contains a type tagged as NativeContainer

        public struct JobResult
        {
            public Matrix4x4[] matrices;
            public float[] indices;
            public AnimatedSpritesheet spritesheet;
        }

hmmm

I can't do that?

[coarse turtle]

yea just convert it to a native array

[rustic rain]

I tried to create nativelist

[river meteor]

okay so i "just went and did that"but i don't really have any kind of illumination as to what's eating my performance

[coarse turtle]

you can alias an array to a native array - like this

[river meteor]

these are what the jobs look like during that frame. but idk if that's bad or what

[rustic rain]

When I convert from native array to normal array

can I dispose native array

?

and expect normal array to work ofc

        public struct JobResult
        {
            public NativeArray<Matrix4x4> matrices;
            public NativeArray<float> indices;
            //public AnimatedSpritesheet spritesheet;
        }

still same error

        NativeList<SpritesheetAnimationJob.JobResult> jobResults = new NativeList<SpritesheetAnimationJob.JobResult>(Allocator.Temp);

stacktrace points to this line

obResult used in native collection is not blittable, not primitive, or contains a type tagged as NativeContainer

oh

well

I can't have native containers inside of other native containers

bruh

[river meteor]

does anyone have any idea?

i can't see any problems or how to correct them with the profile data

i don't know what i'm looking for. i'm new to dots. i don't even know if i set up my scripts properly

[rustic rain]

i don't know what i'm looking for.
if you don't, how can we know?

[river meteor]

???

i mean you told me to look where it's running hot. i am looking right at it. posted ap ic

and i don't have any leads to how to fix it

my project is very simple. i posted the entirety of the code

i would think people in the dots channel would have insight as to why spawning items in dots wouldn't be performant. i don't see how that's unreasonable lol

[rustic rain]

Well, do you know what perfomance you are supposed to see tho?

besides, you probably test it with debugging and all other overhead of editor

which on my end usually eats about 250% of whole perfomance xD

basically, 150 fps in editor, 500 in build

[river meteor]

well i have 10fps

when spawning 10k entities

i was told i should be able to spawn hundreds of thousands

[rustic rain]

not just like that

kek

[river meteor]

what do you mean not just like that?

[rustic rain]

https://youtu.be/t1f8ZreCuuQ?list=PLzDRvYVwl53s40yP5RQXitbT--IRcHqba
You can take a look how code monkey does it

it's not just, go and spawn and expect everything to be perfomant

[river meteor]

i mean, that's why i posted my code

[rustic rain]

it takes special techniques which dots makes possible

[river meteor]

right

so my original question was

i was curious how to modify my code to have performant spawning

[rustic rain]

spawning?

you shouldn't care about that imo

[river meteor]

are you fucking with me

[rustic rain]

you do that only during certain events

not every frame

[river meteor]

the frames suffer after the spawning too

i'm using common language

[rustic rain]

then it's not spawning that is to blame, but keeping those entities

[river meteor]

i didn't think i'd have to elaborate "i want performant spawning and continual performance while those spawned objects live"

you're being needlessly pedantic

we both know what i'm saying and you're being difficult in a way that doesn't help me

[rustic rain]

Sorry, not my intent

but regarding your question

[river meteor]

to be clear

[rustic rain]

take a look at vid I sent

[river meteor]

i want to spawn a lot of shit, and have my games frames not drop to 5

[rustic rain]

just as example

of how it was done

to make it possible

[river meteor]

thank you for the link

[rustic rain]

by itself renderer in dots is meh

[river meteor]

i'll watch it

[rustic rain]

since it keeps actual GO

to draw stuff lol

you can either make your own (which is AAA kind of stuff for 3D)

or just make a compromises

[river meteor]

if it's more reasonable to do it as a 2d game that's fine by me. i was only going to enable planar movement anyway

[rustic rain]

just a reminder, dots is pre alpha or smth

you can't expect it to have stuff ready to work

you have to make most of them yourself

I got burnt out by how complex it is to work with 3d

so I switched to 2D for now xD

[river meteor]

makes sense

i'm gonna look at that unity GDC talk where they did the demo of the spray fire thing

see if i can find code for it, or see enough to copy

[rustic rain]

What are my options if I want to get List of arrays from job?
In my case I need to get arrays per batch

I don't know total size of each array

so I can't make it all big array

But I do know total size of that big array

hmm

[pliant pike]

I don't suppose anyone knows if FixedLists work to store entity's I saw some conflicting info on the forum saying the references can change?

[bitter imp]

hello

how are you

[deft stump]

hrmmm I wonder if I can use ECS for the structure rather than the speed boost

[rustic rain]

yyyep

[deft stump]

would I still need 2020 LTS for that?

[rustic rain]

I work with 2021

[deft stump]

really

[rustic rain]

and use most packages kek

[deft stump]

I'll test it out

[rustic rain]

tertle also uses 2021 no prob

[deft stump]

do I still need to convert my GOs into Entities?

or can I do some finagling to expose the GOs to SystemBase?

[rustic rain]

if you want to use ecs only for entities as data structure

why do you need go at all?

well, you can, but you'll have to do your own bookkeeping

and it won't be as perfomant

[deft stump]

hrmmm

[rustic rain]

whole point is that all entities are nicely aliagned as arrays in memory

GO aren't

[deft stump]

I know about that.

I just like the structure of the code

[rustic rain]

oh well

you can do that just

you won't have GameObjects.ForEach kek

will have to keep your own lists of game objects

[deft stump]

I'm sure I can probably make own filterer

[deft stump]

btw

does it build?

[rustic rain]

last time I tried

it did

all was good

[deft stump]

and does it run?

[rustic rain]

I switched between different scenes even

[deft stump]

gotcha gotcha

[rustic rain]

aka main menu <-> sample scene

[safe lintel]

@deft stump you can either use companion gameobjects or explicitly use AddComponentObject(gameObject/transform/yourClassType) for using gameobjects in systems in foreach on the mainthread

[rustic rain]

All right, soooo...
IS there any way to make this legal?

public struct SpritesheetAnimationJob : IJobEntityBatch
    {
        public struct JobResult
        {
            public Matrix4x4[] matrices;
            public float[] indices;
            public AnimatedSpritesheet spritesheet;
        }
        [ReadOnly] public ComponentTypeHandle<LocalToWorld> matrixHandle;
        [ReadOnly] public ComponentTypeHandle<AnimatorSpritesheetComponent> animatorHandle;
        [ReadOnly] public SharedComponentTypeHandle<AnimatedSpritesheet> spriteSheetHandle;
        public EntityManager entityManager;
 
        public NativeList<JobResult> results;
        public void Execute(ArchetypeChunk batchInChunk, int batchIndex)
        {
            var matrices = batchInChunk.GetNativeArray(matrixHandle);
            var animators = batchInChunk.GetNativeArray(animatorHandle);
            var spriteSheet = batchInChunk.GetSharedComponentData(spriteSheetHandle, entityManager);
 
            float[] indexes = new float[matrices.Length];
            Matrix4x4[] matrixArray = new Matrix4x4[matrices.Length];
            for (int i = 0; i < matrices.Length; i++)
            {
                indexes[i] = animators[i].currentIndex;
                matrixArray[i] = matrices[i].Value;
            }
            results.Add(new JobResult
            {
                matrices = matrixArray,
                indices = indexes,
                spritesheet = spriteSheet,
            });
        }
    }

AnimatedSpritesheet contains only one field with reference type Material

[pliant pike]

or you could just use a crazy way where I sync gameobjects with entity's using the gameobjects GUID

[safe lintel]

@rustic rain you cant use the EntityManager or SharedComponentData inside of jobs, and tbh not really sure how unity likes running the job from .Run with those things. probably easier just to do it on the mainthread

[rustic rain]

I do can use EntityManager kek, idk why but it's required parameter of GetSharedComponentData

that's not the question

the biggest question is that every field in JobResult is illegal

and throws error

upon trying to allocate NativeList<JobResult>

[deft stump]

I can't remember hows those work
but afaik, that would still destroy the GOs from the heirarchy right?

[safe lintel]

@rustic rain oh I see cant have managed arrays inside of nativearrays

[rustic rain]

you don't have to destroy them, if you use component convert to entity, instead of putting them in subscene

[rustic rain]

same thing for NativeArrays

can't have native containers inside of native container

[safe lintel]

yep so gotta do something else 🙂

[rustic rain]

hell, I'll be ready to run this job without burst on main thread

just to make it work

[safe lintel]

@deft stump ConvertAndInject doesnt destroy gameobjects

[rustic rain]

but so far I don't see any other way to get individual batches per ISharedComponent unique component

[deft stump]

do I still need Hybrid renderer?

[rustic rain]

no

you get to choose whatever you want to render stuff

like keeping original game objects

and render through them

[safe lintel]

if you use entities with rendermeshes you need the hybridrenderer

tbh ConvertAndInject isnt necessarily guarenteed to exist in 0.50 or 1.0 so I wouldnt really plan on making anything super integral based on that workflow. no idea what unity plans for its replacement but its been brought up before that they dont view it as a long term workflow

[rustic rain]

I would hate if they remove it

without putting a better alternative

keeping hybrid workflow is impossible without them

ok I got response I know nothing about

1) FixedLists
2) NativeStream
3) Unsafe containers
4) An int2 representing a range of array values for a particular batch
5) Dynamic buffers on batch entities

xD

So FixedLists is kind of reasonable

but Unsafe containers?

NativeStream?

5. is really meh