archived-dots

[rotund token]

the size will be the number of stats in my game, estimated between 100-500 for release

[viral sonnet]

500 stats? teh fuck 😄

[rotund token]

stats are more than you think

str, int, dex etc

increased damage

but its more than that

this is a completely project wide generic system

stat could be ability to talk to actor

you'll love this

[viral sonnet]

ah cool, so pretty much every variable to track something

[rotund token]

{
    public float Value;
}

public struct StatEffect : IComponentData
{
    /// <summary> The stat type this affects. It matches the index in the stat schemas. </summary>
    public ushort Type;
    public ShortHalfUnion Value;
    public StatModifyType ModifyType;
}

public unsafe struct StatValueBuffer : IBufferElementData
{
    [NativeDisableUnsafePtrRestriction]
    internal StatEffect* Effect;
}

public unsafe struct StatValue : IComponentData
{
    [NativeDisableUnsafePtrRestriction]
    internal StatEffect* Effect;
}```

stats are part of my effect system

all my effects are tiny standalone entities

{
    public ushort Type;
}

public struct ConditionActive : IComponentData
{
    public BitArray8 Active;
}

public struct EffectActive : IComponentData
{
    public bool Active;
}```

so StatValue exists on the effect entity

but the owning actor has the same ptr in a buffer (all stat effects of an entity have a pointer into this buffer)

so stats can write their state directly to their owning entity without needing to do BufferFromEntity(Entity)

basically 5 types of effects atm that control everything

• modify stats (above)
• capabilities (put things on cooldown etc)
• add tags (stunned, invisible, etc)
• remove modifiers (poison etc)
• create new effects

[misty wedge]

Are your dependencies handled with the normal job dependency system?

[viral sonnet]

ah that's pretty good, I utilize pointer caching too. do you set the ptr all the time or how do you handle chunk changes when the ptr would change too?

[rotund token]

yeah they are actually

everything is ISystem atm

i use some query tricks to ensure safety

[rotund token]

its not pointing to the entity

the entity change it doesn't matter

it's pointing to a large chunk of 'stat' memory

basically i sat down and was like, how would i do this if i was using c++

[misty wedge]

Something I was wondering, if I have an IComponentData with an UnsafeCollection inside, it should be safe to write to that unsafe collection inside a scheduled job as long as I'm declaring that dependency properly, right? (e.g. ref inside an Entities.ForEach). I assume it just won't detect me modifying it if I don't pass the correct dependency

[viral sonnet]

ah cool, how do you manage the big block of memory?

btw. the picture you've just scribbled down is why I think ecs is not *that * great

[rotund token]

traditionally i'd do this all on the actor entity

but by separating it, it's a lot more dynamic and easier to develop

i can conditions a lot easier

and also checking condition changes on effects is just much faster in tiny archetypes

i can actually smash 10,000,000 effect entity checks

in a fraction of a ms

i think it was 0.24ms if the chunks had nothing else

going up to 0.74ms if i add 32 bytes of random data in the archetype

[viral sonnet]

so the block in the middle is still an ecs chunk?

[rotund token]

nope

the middle block is my own managed memory (managed bad term, i mean i'm managing it)

cant use ecs chunks, it'd move

[viral sonnet]

yeah, thought so 🙂

a lot of design ended up in such blocks or I'm planning to. shame that unity hasn't thought of it. maybe because they are not actually developing games 😄

[misty wedge]

I doubt very many games need the performance required by such a system, and if they do, I think you are at the point where you either decide to work around the kinks or write your own engine

[viral sonnet]

can you detail the middle block somewhat? I'm mostly using a data type similar to NativeList. linear memory, able to grow

[rotund token]

UnsafeUtility.Malloc

except i have custom native memory allocators

i havent decided which i'll use it

i have a bunch of slaballoctors etc

need to determine what works best in actual realistic conditions

[misty wedge]

Is there a list of stuff that they plan to add in with 1.0 besides the "journey to 1.0" or whatever the post was?

[viral sonnet]

just malloc? is this a frame buffer then? how do handle resizes?

yeah there's a whole roadmap

you have surely seen t

[misty wedge]

This one? https://forum.unity.com/threads/dots-development-status-and-next-milestones-june-2022.1291766/

[viral sonnet]

https://unity.com/roadmap/unity-platform/dots not that exciting, official hybrid support, better tooling

[misty wedge]

Ah I haven't actually seen that one

Haven't had a lot of time to check up on DOTS stuff since I've had to learn inferior languages like python and JS :[

[rotund token]

what do you mean? the value only a single float

and it's persistent while the effect entity exists

[viral sonnet]

ah ok, I thought it's a global buffer for all stat values. so the block is per actor?

[rotund token]

it is a global buffer of all stats

each player has a buffer of the stats that are on them

[viral sonnet]

python is great, had to use it for tensorflow. python > c# for ML

[misty wedge]

Yeah for ML the community around it is pretty great

Only had a short course in university on it and while it was interesting it's not really my thing

too much math @_@

[devout prairie]

Any idea if there is any guarantee of the order of an EntityQuery

ie say you have a bunch of components called MyTag, that are created in a specific order, one after the other

and they are never destroyed

would an EntityQuery for those always return an array in the order they were created

[misty wedge]

I wouldn't rely on it

If you need their order why not just index them

[devout prairie]

yeah i'm wondering, maybe layout/order could change maybe if archetypes/chunks change

[viral sonnet]

pretty much every system i'm optimizing and happy with then is a process of moving lots of data into specialized containers. putting all data into a chunk is such a trap. I still have not really found a good feel of which data should end up there and which shouldn't. that's really hard and often unintuitive to find out.

[devout prairie]

basically wondering if i can avoid doing that tbh

[misty wedge]

What do you need their order for?

[viral sonnet]

so that buffer has to grow somehow with the actors. or am i missing something?

[misty wedge]

Just do this: UnsafeUtility.Malloc(SystemInfo.systemMemorySize * 1000000, UnsafeUtility.AlignOf<float>(), Allocator.Persistent);

Computers hate this one simple trick

[devout prairie]

ah not worth explaining tbh, i'll give it a whack as is and if i have problems later will index them

[misty wedge]

Relying on the order of the entities just seems like it could produce some nasty bugs down the line

[viral sonnet]

if the chunks doesn't change and only grow the order stays the same

i just wonder how you'd never delete something but if you don't, you're good. also, entity indexing is quite fast which wouldn't rely on being completely deterministic

is blob data actually put on the stack? or how can we force to put the whole blob there? i think ref reading values one by one slows down a lot. maybe I'm wrong though

[misty wedge]

I think only the reference is put on the stack

But since the entire blob is layed out linearly in memory it should be in the cache after you access it and be very fast

[viral sonnet]

my blob would exceed a cacheline

[misty wedge]

That doesn't change if you were to somehow copy it

You'll still need to actually read it

[rotund token]

when a new effect is created yes, the effect has to add itself (and the ptr) to the buffer

effects aren't super frequently created

on piece of gear [un]equipped

on point put in talent tree etc

etc

[misty wedge]

on bite taken out of croissant? if it's a poison croissant?

[rotund token]

the more frequent ones would be via combat, poisoning etc

probably handled by ecb.AppendToBuffer but undecided

depends how i implement that side of it

[misty wedge]

Are "old" effects deleted? Otherwise I feel you would have a lot very quickly

For example if someone eats a lot of poisoned croissants in a short timeframe

[rotund token]

yeah that'd be a bunch of effects

i'm testing with 10,000,000

and processing state changes in under 1ms

so atm i can handle a lot of effects on a basic level

obviously that number will never be that high and there's a lot of other parts that won't be nearly as fast

[misty wedge]

That's a lot of croissants

[rotund token]

Croissant eating game

Get a pack of croissants as a bonus for early access

[misty wedge]

Marketing ✅

[devout prairie]

anybody know if there is a method to get a euler from a math.quaternion

[viral sonnet]

i'm not aware of any math.euler, have to roll your own I guess https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12088610/conversion-between-euler-quaternion-like-in-unity3d-engine?answertab=trending#tab-top has some answers

[rotund token]

yeah bit of a pain

[viral sonnet]

i wouldn't recommend it though. do you really need the euler angles?

[rotund token]

i think the physics package has some

generally i feel like the main good case of euler angles is (first person) character controllers

[devout prairie]

thanks yeah i'm deconstructing and reconstructing some bone rotations with per-axis adjustments

[viral sonnet]

be aware of inaccuracies, angles could start to drift

[devout prairie]

yeah, thankfully i realized i actually only need to do it one way for now, so i can use quaternion.Euler(float3) to construct a rotation from a euler

i might need to actually get the euler value from a quaternion at some point though

[viral sonnet]

is this an actual downside of profilemarkers? i measure every part of the code yet there are these huge gaps in between

[rotund token]

my job without profile markers, 0.6ms, my job with profile markers, 2.4ms

profile markers don't profile themselves!

[viral sonnet]

hm, i'd at least expect the gaps to be the same size, yet the last one is much wider

and yeah, profiler markers should profile themself and show it. as they are now they are pretty trash

at least, i'm not figuring anything out other than, a quite involved method that does a lot takes double the time as acquiring GetBufferAccessor that's only called once. that can't be right ...

if i comment out the method the job is so much faster that the method takes at least 80% of the time. I don't get why that's not showing up with the markers

burst must remove a lot when i comment it out. otherwise i can't explain it

[devout prairie]

Okay so i have an interesting quaternion math problem:

Normally to get the world/global position from a local position you would do:

Vector3 childGlobalPosition = (Quaternion)parentGlobalRotation * (Vector3)childLocalPos + (Vector3)parentGlobalPosition

However in Unity.Mathematics it's not possible to do the equivalent quaternion * float3 like this:

float3 childGlobalPosition = (quaternion)parentGlobalRotation * (float3)childLocalPos + (float3)parentGlobalPosition

I have no idea of the math to make this work

using math.mul((quaternion)parentGlobalRotation, (float3)childLocalPos) doesnt work either

[rustic rain]

you mean it doesn't recognize multiplication syntax?

[devout prairie]

nah it just doesn't allow quat*float3

[rustic rain]

ahem, weird it won't mul quat and f3

[devout prairie]

i think in standard unity it's setup to allow Quaternion * Vector3

but not with the Mathematics library

this type of math really isn't my strong point 😐

[rustic rain]

well, it surely must allow you to mul(quat, f3)

can you double check?

[devout prairie]

yeah no it doesn't

ah wait

i'm an idiot

it does

jeez, was forgetting to replace the * with a , in math.mul

not enough sleep, is my official® excuse

[rustic rain]

classic

well, TIL that to get world position of child you just multiply rotation by local position

[devout prairie]

sorry what du mean?

[rustic rain]

I didn't know how to do that one

but now I know

kek

You came for help, but you actually gave me one xD

[devout prairie]

Ahh hehe.. yeah I really need to learn the math behind this stuff properly, I basically just pick up what I need to get the thing done

Having stuff like transform.InverseTransformPoint etc is mega convenient but you can get away with years of not knowing the math behind it

In the same token, you dont need to know the circuit diagram of a CPU to be able to operate a PC

[rustic rain]

Knowing math helps as you will be able to create complex algorithms

[devout prairie]

just to note - remember to also add parent position to that, so: childGlobalPos = parentGlobalRot * childLocalPos + parentGlobalPos

[rustic rain]

I personally enjoy creating world space animations through async code a lot

[devout prairie]

That's actually part of what i'm doing

I've created a code driven procedural walk animation

Then i've used it to drive a custom IK system

Which then drives the joints of an active ragdoll setup

So it's, kinda complex, but i built and prototyped each part in gameobject world with standard unity mono's and joints etc, then unified the code into one single mono/update, and now i'm transferring the whole thing to pure dots

[rustic rain]

why not do it through dots in the first place?

Seems like same effort while testing

[devout prairie]

mm well prototyping i think is definitely 10x faster with standard unity

not thinking about data layouts and ordering etc etc

[rustic rain]

uugh, I rarely think about data layouts in dots at all xD

[devout prairie]

just throw some code together, build some gameobject prefabs, tweak joints and values easily in the editor etc

fair enough yeah, i do find it easier to prototype in the editor though

i think, for pure logic situations, ie not dealing with joints and hierarchies so much, dots is arguably just as quick and maybe actually simpler/easier

this is the procedural walk cycle, the gameobject version, before i added in the active ragdoll setup:
https://gyazo.com/351c57d47a1cddd9e37ebbcd047d28ff

really looking forward to seeing how it performs once i've finished the dots version

life would be a bit easier if they hadn't removed the Animation package 😐

that's basically why i decided to prototype a procedural anim system

i tested unity's Animation Rigging for IK, it's really nice and runs on Jobs, but it relies on having an Animator component so can't be used for a pure dots solution, would need to be hybrid setup

[rotund token]

imo it's ill-advised to use vs code for dots at this stage

i would definitely stick with vs studio or rider

but to answer your question, not really sure sorry

so v-rising is interesting - first game i've seen make use of subscenes, 1744 of them to be precise!

[solemn hollow]

first time seeing it. looks great

[rotund token]

oh the game? super popular

35k reviews on steam in 1 month

they have some really giant jobs

[solemn hollow]

is there a talk about it?

[rotund token]

no

i'm just decompiling the code ^_^'

[solemn hollow]

🙂

[rotund token]

well i probably won't go that deep because il2cpp and i cbf

just looking at signatures atm

can tell you a lot

HandleGameplayEventsSystem for example has 25 BufferFromEntity

[solemn hollow]

maybe just 25 diffrent eventqueues?

[rotund token]

they aren't all events*

oh well, time to actually play it 😄

public BufferFromEntity<AggroDamageHistoryBufferElement> getAggroDamageHistoryBuffer; // 0x16B0

stuff like this

[solemn hollow]

you know how big their team was?

[rotund token]

moderate

i had a look before

https://www.stunlock.com/about

35 on this list

[solemn hollow]

ah the bloodline champion guys

[devout prairie]

any idea if it uses dots Animation?

[solemn hollow]

i had a follow up question to your effects implementation.
How do you handle update order of affected stats and when and how do you update the stats on a unit?

Do you recalculate all stats whenever a new effect is added to a unit?

How do you deal with stuff like agility attribute changes speed. (all agility must be calculated before speed then)

after you can calculate the speed from items + attributes etc

[rotund token]

How do you handle update order of affected stats and when and how do you update the stats on a unit?
first pass i literally update them every frame

that was what i was testing this morning when i had weird performance

[solemn hollow]

ah ok

[rotund token]

can update 10k units with 512 stats in 0.70ms

but yeah my next objective is to filter this down a lot since its really not needed

[solemn hollow]

well with such a performance you dont really care if you recalculate all stats on one unit if 1 effect changes

my system is supposed to be reactive. but i still have to check every effect every frame for what i believe you called conditions

[rustic rain]

but you can do it with dots either. Make component with settings, make system that reacts on this component and you can even edit it in runtime

every time you change component data in subscene

it'll regenerate that entity

thus you can tweak everything in editor

[devout prairie]

yeah, subscenes for me are buggy and fickle tho, not worth the hassle

i'll move things in to a subscene at a later point if it makes sense to, but at this point, it causes more problems than anything

[rustic rain]

But you can create subscene just for this testing purpose

literally drop 1 entity here

do not close it upon clicking Run

and here you go

fully debuggable entity, ability to edit authoring component

it's actually that easy

[devout prairie]

yeahhh that easy if you're doing something simple maybe.. i eventually decided to just stop fighting it and not use them

problems with conversion scripts running or not, problems with scripts updating after changes, etc etc etc

[rustic rain]

hmm

Can I use Unsafe Container in component?

or do I just use buffer?

hmm

all right, generate attribute

still doesn't support it

[rotund token]

nothing stopping unsafe containers

its just a pain to manage the memory

[rustic rain]

how so?

I thought unsafe containers are just normal native ones with pointer instead of actual memory

[solemn hollow]

how much performance improvement did you guys see when switching to ISystem for a System that is basically just scheduling one job and doing nothing else on mainthread? is it worth the hassle right now?

[safe lintel]

personally my relatively complex systems tend not to be that complex and also use things that cant be used with ISystem yet so its hard to tell

[rustic rain]

what's up with ISystem?

Never heard of it or it's use

also not a single word in manual

[safe lintel]

unmanaged burstable systems

[rustic rain]

wait what, where is burst compile settings are now?

[safe lintel]

same as they were before?

[rustic rain]

No option to disable compilation

🤔

[solemn hollow]

It always was in Jobs menu

[rustic rain]

oh

me blind

[solemn hollow]

does anyone else randomly have spikes in systems execution on mainthread? i have some frames where certain systems just need 100x more time than usual. and all the system does on mainthread is scheduling... so how does it take nearly 1ms to schedule 2 jobs???

usually its around 0.01-0.02 ms

it has something to do with DisposeSentinel.Create

[rustic rain]

yep, I do

no idea what is that

[karmic basin]

Then it won't be a problem at runtime :)

[rustic rain]

allthough, it might be jobs debugging

[solemn hollow]

ah i didnt know. but u mean build right?

[karmic basin]

Yep, in a build

[solemn hollow]

and why do i have those red bars there telling me i allocate garbage when the profiler says i generate 0 garbage?

[karmic basin]

I don't remember if it's one of the safeties you can disable or Always on

[karmic basin]

Can't answer that one, maybe the safeties do allocate some garbage

[solemn hollow]

hmm safety is off though

leak detection is still on.

[karmic basin]

Yeah should be this safety. To warn you when you forget to dispose

Hence the name

(dispose sentinel)

[solemn hollow]

still i find it weird that it just spikes sometimes.

but i can confirm it is the leak detection. no more spikes without it

[gilded glacier]

does anyone use or know of some ecs frameworks ?

I had started making my own sort of "framework", because ecs is kinda barebone, and I don't like some features, like the default bootstrap, which is simple, yet not very practical solution

[solemn hollow]

well DreamingImLatios has a framework with some nice tooling inside. havent tried it though

[gilded glacier]

the problem is that writing my own framework takes time (so I don't really contribute to my projects) and is incremental, you could say, because I add features and solutions only when I encounter the problem

[gilded glacier]

yes, that's the one I just found

are there any more options ?

[solemn hollow]

there are some nice packages that help with events and polymorphism in components but not so much frameworks

[gilded glacier]

not that I know everything it does, it's that I have a solution for addressables that I've incorporated into my code

[solemn hollow]

Latios even said he shouldnt have named it framework.

[gilded glacier]

what would he call it ?

[solemn hollow]

i think he said its actually a collection of tools atm. but im not sure. its somewhere buried to an answer to me on the forums i think

but thats the most complete "framework" you will find

[gilded glacier]

it has some nice features, like physics, audio and stuff

I just try to analyze what it can do, whether it's worth porting my projects to it, but his demo kinda discouraged me with his rap god style description of certain use cases, instead of describing general stuff, workflows, and how things relate to each other

I've had a similar problem with svelto ecs, as all the necessary information was encrypted and turned into lengthy articles, and I ended up making a whole diagram to visualize individual stuff and how they relate to each other (not to mention different naming)

[solemn hollow]

well ecs just isnt easy to make userfriendly yet. so there is much to explain i guess

[rustic rain]

why unity ECS is not an option?

[gilded glacier]

by framework I mean something built atop of unity ecs, of course

[rustic rain]

ah

as in some kind of template

[gilded glacier]

yeah, sort of

[rustic rain]

I wouldn't really rely on that ngl

considering state of ECS atm

[gilded glacier]

also, hybrid solutions are necessities even today, and I'm afraid vanilla unity ecs is not handling it well

[rustic rain]

on new update you might just end up with not updated framework

because ECS might change a lot

[rustic rain]

depends

[gilded glacier]

that's why they say it's not production ready ...

[rustic rain]

there are certainly no ready solutions for a lot of problems

but nothing stops you from recreating them yourself

[gilded glacier]

yes, there are things that do

like time

I tend to regret not putting my time and energy into the final product

and I assure you, I've wasted a lot of time on such things

already made tools and solution, even if it would mean sticking to the same ecs version for the entire life of a project, might just be the best, I just need to know which are made the most suitable way for my case, as I use addressables, the new input and ui packages, and I do things procedurally, so there's like no gameobject to entity conversion (most of the stuff isn't even supported by ecs, such as animations, audio, lighting, etc.)

[rustic rain]

yep, but just not in this alpha state of ECS

[solemn hollow]

why is building subscenes SO much slower... pre converting my project to subscenes i had buildtimes of around 20-30 min. now it takes close to 60

[rustic rain]

wha

20-30 mins

is already a lot

[solemn hollow]

yap...

idk what im doing wrong

[solemn hollow]

...

and then the build doesnt even start... without giving me an error i comprehend T_T

[rustic rain]

hmm

is there a way to profile building process?

[solemn hollow]

no idea atm. i dont even know anything specific about the building process... cant find how build cache works etc.

also i dont understand why it wouldnt use the incremental build pipeline in my case...

i build into the same folder without any changes. it still takes 50 min

[solemn hollow]

Asset Pipeline Refresh: Total: 0.306 seconds - Initiated by RefreshV2(AllowForceSynchronousImport)
    Summary:
        Imports: total=0 (actual=0, local cache=0, cache server=0)
        Asset DB Process Time: managed=0 ms, native=304 ms
        Asset DB Callback time: managed=0 ms, native=1 ms
        Scripting: domain reloads=0, domain reload time=0 ms, compile time=0 ms, other=0 ms
        Project Asset Count: scripts=11699, non-scripts=5231
        Asset File Changes: new=0, changed=0, moved=0, deleted=0
        Scan Filter Count: 1
    InvokeBeforeRefreshCallbacks: 1.591ms
    ApplyChangesToAssetFolders: 0.273ms
    Scan: 272.346ms
    GatherAllCurrentPrimaryArtifactRevisions: 1.366ms
    UnloadStreamsBegin: 3.169ms
    UnloadStreamsEnd: 0.048ms
    Untracked: 27.532ms

this is from the editor log. its scanning the files and sees 0 changes (takes 272.346ms. -> ca. 5 min)

then it does this multiple times over...

the next scan takes 800k ms

why is this so slow and why is it done multiple times

[rustic rain]

hmm, is it possible to edit gravity factor in physics body?

[solemn hollow]

IIRC yes

[rustic rain]

I need to be able to toggle body from being kinematic and dynamic

Can't find on which component

it is written

[solemn hollow]

sry cant look... building

should be in body

[rustic rain]

no idea what is it

Tried changing inverse mass

it resulted in weird result

[solemn hollow]

ah i meant its in PhysicsBodyAuthoring

no idea in which IComponentData it is written in conversion

@rustic rain if (body.GravityFactor != 1) { DstEntityManager.AddOrSetComponent(entity, new PhysicsGravityFactor { Value = body.GravityFactor }); }

from the conversionsystem (PhysicsBodyConversionSystem)

[rustic rain]

yeah, but it's required in runtime

[solemn hollow]

?

[rustic rain]

switching body from kinematic

to dynamic

I think

it's inverse mass after all

but it's so weird

[solemn hollow]

why you think its inverse mass? the snippet i posted shows u that it should be in a PhysicsGravityFactor component

at runtime

[rustic rain]

wha

I don't even have that component

xD

maybe it's added

upon

modifying gravity factor from default

[solemn hollow]

look into the conversionsystem i got it from

[rustic rain]

well yeah

seems like it's added if not -1

according to that code

[solemn hollow]

yes. and -1 seems to mean that the body is kinematic

[rustic rain]

isn't it supposed to be 0?

-1 seems like will just reverse gravity

[solemn hollow]

where did you get -1?

i see it is added if it is not 1

since a factor of 1 would do nothing

[rustic rain]

oh

just typo

I meant 1

[solemn hollow]

{
get => m_MotionType == BodyMotionType.Dynamic ? m_GravityFactor : 0f;
set => m_GravityFactor = value;
}

thats from PhysicsBodyAuthoring

[robust scaffold]

I have no clue how to use a subscene

And the fact that the DOTS hierarchy doesnt highlight the currently selected entity is so fucking dumb

How did that manage to make it past QA?

[Worker2] 1 entities in the scene 'TestSubscene' had no SceneSection and as a result were not serialized at all.
Anyone know what this is?

[solemn hollow]

im sure subscenes will be amazing at some point. RN using them has alot of hidden implications im not totally aware of yet. i am still converting stuff to be compatible with subscenes... took me quite a while already. I expected performance speedups but really it feels slower working with them in my current workflow

[solemn hollow]

is that a gameobject you spawned or is it in the scenehierarchy already?

[robust scaffold]

Ehhhh, i'm gonna stick with the tried and true just manually convert it using OnStart

[solemn hollow]

do you mean the converttoentity component?

[robust scaffold]

No. Make my own monobehavior that has a section of code in OnStart() or OnAwake() that gets World.DefaultGameObjectInjectionWorld And just creates the entity with relevant components.

Never go anywhere near the conversion workflow

[solemn hollow]

ah so no conversion but basically spawning in first frame

[robust scaffold]

pretty much yea

and destroying the GO after first frame

unless it needs to be rendered of course

i havent gotten to the point of creating my own rendering system for sprite so I use the built in one

[solemn hollow]

well conversion will be the standard and optimized workflow at some point. if you have a project that will go on for a while i think its better to use subscenes sooner rather than later

[robust scaffold]

well, it seems intended for the HybridRenderer ecosystem but I dont have HR so it breaks sprite rendering

[solemn hollow]

ah wait was it you who just used 1 or 2 systems and the rest was still gameobject code?

[robust scaffold]

Yea

[solemn hollow]

yeah makes sense then.

[robust scaffold]

Do we still need the convert to entity component if its being converted by subscene?

[solemn hollow]

how i handle sprite renderer (with pure ecs gamelogic) is instantiating a gameobject for each entity that needs a spriterenderer and sync the gameobjects transform

[solemn hollow]

no

[robust scaffold]

Do you have to add the "SceneSection" component to all entities being converted

[solemn hollow]

if they are converted by a subscene they should have it

maybe if you instantiate extra entities aside from the ones created by conversion you need to add it?

but it should work with CreateAdditionalEntitiy()

[robust scaffold]

How do you use this section of the inspector?

[solemn hollow]

umm not sure but you probably need to use the right LiveConversion setting

[robust scaffold]

It's active

[solemn hollow]

where do you have this Entity Conversion preview? havent seen it yet

[robust scaffold]

Right below

[solemn hollow]

works for me

[robust scaffold]

huh, recreated the GO again and it works

[solemn hollow]

sometimes the scenecache is somehow broken.

you can use this to clear it and force it to rebuild:

[robust scaffold]

hrm, if I add my PointLight conversion script, it breaks again

when I remove it, it works

[solemn hollow]

your script got deleted. but i didnt see anything wrong at first glance

[robust scaffold]

hrm

Adding a generateAuthoringComponent makes it work but not my own IConvertGameObject

I wish I could set default values but this is fine

[devout prairie]

bbeemmsa

[robust scaffold]

So how would you keep something like a SpriteRenderer?

[solemn hollow]

i use hybrid renderer for sprites that dont have animation

so i just let the spriterenderer be converted

[robust scaffold]

Thats annoying, im gonna have to do it myself

[solemn hollow]

for everything with animation i spawn a gameobject after conversion which is only the representation and sync it with the entity pos

that way i can still use all the old systems which have no ECS implementation yet but can do all the costly stuff like AI in ecs

[robust scaffold]

Because I can not convert physics 2d colliders and movement must be through the physics system

[solemn hollow]

through the old physics?

[robust scaffold]

yea

not DOTS physics, just regular 2D physics

i had issues with instability and vibration when moving against DOTS physics surfaces even with the Z level of objects clamped

Anyone know how to remove that message?

what the fuck is wrong with the entity debugger anyways? It has HIGHLIGHTED ENTITIES

Guess which entity i clicked

Guess which entity I clicked

BLUE HIGHLIGHTS. REVOLUTIONARY

[solemn hollow]

well in theory it is replaced by those debuggers :

oh wait you dont know about the dots hierarchy?

[robust scaffold]

nope

The first image is the debugger, second is the hierarchy

what do i need to toggle on to allow selected entities be highlighted

because in its current state, it's unusable

[solemn hollow]

ah i see now what you mean. i guess the highligthing broke in 2021 or sth. it worked before.

if you have the SubScene in edit mode you see which one you selected atleast

(the one with the cube symbol)

[robust scaffold]

Yea, barely

so dumb

I want to remove that message, it takes up nearly a fourth of the window

[solemn hollow]

well that will be fixed. for now its totally fine to use the entitydebugger. it has features the other debuggers dont really have yet

[robust scaffold]

the debugger works so well. Old reliable. Unity should stop trying to reinvent the wheel with so many useless windows and empty space

[solemn hollow]

there are some nice new concepts too. i like the relationships stuff.

[robust scaffold]

The inspector I admit is the one place they actually improved

Hierarchy, system, and archetypes need to be scrapped

[solemn hollow]

idk. i like it actually. i just miss the possibility to filter for a set of components in the hierarchy

[rotund token]

Yeah hierarchy just needs proper filtering

I barely find myself using entity debugger anymore now

[robust scaffold]

Maybe because I'm doing my own hybrid things, I still need the GO list up and inspector. I dont have the room for 3 more windows

[rotund token]

I just have dots hierarchy and normal hierarchy in same group

And just switch between the tabs

I agree I can't have them all on the screen at once

But entities debugger is so big can't have it on the screen at all!

[robust scaffold]

Yea, conversion is a neat concept but I need GOs mirrored in ECS world, not the other way around. Physics2D doesnt work well with entity conversion.

Hrm, i might just create my own conversion system with that priority in mind

[solemn hollow]

@rotund token you got any idea why incremental builds could be broken? i need 50+ min per build even without changes

[rotund token]

That seems very long

Only takes me 15min for a full build at work...

Unless I'm doing like super optimised ps4 which needs like 128gh memory and 4 hours...

[solemn hollow]

Total: 687.795292 ms (FindLiveObjects: 67.524917 ms CreateObjectMapping: 22.962209 ms MarkObjects: 595.840083 ms DeleteObjects: 1.467167 ms)

Memory consumption went from 4.56 GB to 4.55 GB.

[rotund token]

Well that's 1.2 seconds

My personal project build time halved in 2021 over 2020

Only 3 min on il2cpp

[solemn hollow]

ups wait i thought that was a summary

oh lol sry that was not the build. that was an asset pipeline refresh in editor

[rotund token]

But yeah work still 2020 so have no major project to compare

[solemn hollow]

well i wouldnt call my project major.. thats the thing

[rotund token]

What level is your c++ compiler on

[solemn hollow]

where do i see that? :S

[rotund token]

Project settings

Debug, release or master from memory

Release should be default, master on some platforms could take a long time

[solemn hollow]

u mean this ?

[rotund token]

No

[solemn hollow]

hmm you know which sub menu it is located at? cant seem to find it

ah :

in build settings i did build with mono. cause IL2CPP wouldnt build at all

i also read somewhere that mono is supposed to be building faster

im trying another il2cpp build now

UnityEditor.Build.Pipeline.ContentPipeline:BuildAssetBundles (UnityEditor.Build.Pipeline.Interfaces.IBundleBuildParameters,UnityEditor.Build.Pipeline.Interfaces.IBundleBuildContent,UnityEditor.Build.Pipeline.Interfaces.IBundleBuildResults&,System.Collections.Generic.IList`1<UnityEditor.Build.Pipeline.Interfaces.IBuildTask>,UnityEditor.Build.Pipeline.Interfaces.IContextObject[])
Unity.Scenes.Editor.EntitySceneBuildUtility:PrepareAdditionalFiles (Unity.Entities.Hash128[],UnityEditor.Experimental.ArtifactKey[],UnityEditor.BuildTarget,System.Action`2<string, string>,string) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.entities@0.51.0-preview.32/Unity.Scenes.Editor/EntitySceneBuildUtility.cs:219)```

no idea what causes this 😦

omfg :

IL2CPP requires the use of generic sharing to work when using Unity 2021 LTS. This can be enabled via Project Settings > Player > Configuration Section > IL2CPP Code Generation > Faster (smaller) builds. Depending on how generic types are used by your game, there will be an additional runtime cost in IL2CPP builds with generic sharing enabled. We are actively looking into this issue; please share any feedback you have to help guide our efforts towards addressing this.```

and this Faster (smaller) builds Option is only available in alpha builds...?

[coarse turtle]

No it's available in 2021 too

[solemn hollow]

oh man. in the post i posted above it was supposed to be in Project Settings > Player > Configuration Section > IL2CPP Code Generation > Faster (smaller) builds.

mind you this is the actual current post explaining knows issues for Entities 0.51...

[coarse turtle]

Huh - so this is all I did to get my build working in 2021 and entities 0.51 🤔

https://forum.unity.com/threads/executionengineexception-attempting-to-call-method-unity-entities-fastequality-compareimpl-1.1296462/#post-8213826 this was the post I followed just for the configuration since it wasn't in the Player Settings

[rustic rain]

I am messing with 2d on ecs rn btw

Managed to make it work by adjusting colliders

And applying 0 velocity to certain constraints every tick

So far seems to fullfill my needs

Which is collisions, triggers and a bit of gravity

[solemn hollow]

thank you! i hope ill get it to run now

[robust scaffold]

My project is also centered nearly entirely around a tilemap and it's collider. Have you had any luck converting a tilemap collider composite to dots physics?

[rustic rain]

I don't use those

What exactly are you trying to achieve?

[robust scaffold]

just 2d gameplay with a tilemap

[solemn hollow]

top down or side?

[robust scaffold]

top down

[rustic rain]

So what's up with tilemap?

[solemn hollow]

so do you actually need a collider or is everything on y = 0 anyways?

i do top down 2,5D and i just use a navmesh on my tilemap

[rustic rain]

I haven't used classic unity much so I don't really have much idea xD

[robust scaffold]

converting a composite collider2d into a 3d physics collider mesh is painful and even then, moving along its surface causes vibrations

i got a lot of projectiles as well that bounce off the collider as well

[solemn hollow]

but has your tilemap height?

[robust scaffold]

no, just flat 2d

[solemn hollow]

then why not have a huge plane as a collider. and some kind of navmesh where your agents actually move that is baked from the tilemap

[rustic rain]

What's even the point of tilemap collider

Why not just have many box colliders?

Or plane

[robust scaffold]

i got a lot of colliders, moving a bunch of box colliders will massacre performance

[rustic rain]

Hmm

If you move through translation

[solemn hollow]

honestly im not sure it would. if you make them static it might work anyways

[rustic rain]

It won't have any effect of perfomance

Physics world is rebuilt every tick

[solemn hollow]

not for static objects

[rustic rain]

From current state of components on entities

[rotund token]

what manarz said

physics is broken into 2 groups, static/dynamics. statics only rebuild if something has changed.

[rustic rain]

If you instantiate static object during runtime

Does it count?

[robust scaffold]

hrm, i'll see if anything changed with physics since the last time I checked

[solemn hollow]

well obviously it leads to 1 recalculation of the static world

[robust scaffold]

which was about back during 0.15 days

[rustic rain]

Doesn't sound too bad

Considering dynamic world suffers worse fate most of the time

[rotund token]

on a tangent, i would not have made a 2d game in entities - you guys love pain 😬

[rustic rain]

It's fine

[solemn hollow]

well i couldnt do it without dots performance

[rustic rain]

It took just 2 systems

To turn 2d into 3d

[rotund token]

dots != entities

[rustic rain]

1 to edit authoring

2 to fix physics velocity for my orientation

[solemn hollow]

true but back then i didnt know lol

[rustic rain]

Everything else is same as 3d

[solemn hollow]

and i fucking love ecs architecture

[rustic rain]

Triggers collisions and etc

[rustic rain]

Same

I cringe every time I have to work in classic unity world xD

Hopefully dots will make it to 1.0 and someone might hire me xD

[solemn hollow]

but tertle is right. 2D was a lot of PITA. just today i finally managed to get rid of all the unnecassary 2D Tools overhead unity has... Like sprite Resolver at runtime. IK manager at runtime, Sprite Sorting Groups

i went from 40fps to 80 fps in editor...

[rustic rain]

Wha

So you just edited manifest file?

[rotund token]

not sure about that

    batchInChunk.DidChange(LocalToWorldType, m_LastSystemVersion) ||
    batchInChunk.DidChange(PositionType, m_LastSystemVersion) ||
    batchInChunk.DidChange(RotationType, m_LastSystemVersion) ||
    batchInChunk.DidChange(PhysicsColliderType, m_LastSystemVersion) ||
    batchInChunk.DidOrderChange(m_LastSystemVersion);
if (didBatchChange)
{

    Result[0] = 1;
}```

```if (world.NumStaticBodies != previousStaticBodyCount)
{
    haveStaticBodiesChanged[0] = 1;```

```if (buildStaticTree)
{
    m_StaticTree.Reset(staticBodies.Length);
    BuildStaticTree(staticBodies, aabbMargin);
}```

any change to any static causes the entire static tree to rebuild

[rustic rain]

And removed unnecessary packages?

[solemn hollow]

thats what i meant. again im bad with words i guess? 🙂

[rotund token]

oh i get you, 1 recalculation

i thought you meant, only 1 entity is recalculated

not 1 physics world is recalculated

[solemn hollow]

well incremental rebuilding would be nice to have

but honestly the static scene should be static

[rotund token]

well unity physics is specifically designed around being stateless

[solemn hollow]

ah true. that would also be considered state

[rustic rain]

What about those 2d tools you mentioned?

[solemn hollow]

whenever i think i understand how to get sth deterministic and stateless i always am surprised at the actual implications

[rustic rain]

I want fos improvement too xD

[solemn hollow]

no i didnt remove the unnecassary packages. i disabled the components responsible for that stuff at runtime. my artists still wants that stuff for editor workflow

but to be able to do that we had to change a lot about how we built our prefabs

[rustic rain]

Ah, it's your own code you disabled?

Or unity's?

[solemn hollow]

no i just disabled the IKManager2D for example. so unitys

but that again meant i had to write a tool that converted Animations with Ik to Animations without IK

[rustic rain]

Smth I don't use at all, it seems

[solemn hollow]

its the 2DAnimation package

[rustic rain]

I am stuck with animator

As hybrid

[solemn hollow]

yes me too

not hybrid though? on a gameobject

[rustic rain]

On go yes

Works fine

[devout prairie]

Havok has this option called Contact Point Welding which might solve this, not sure

[rustic rain]

If I execute animator manually

[devout prairie]

Was reading up on Havok earlier, just wondered if it related to the problem you were having

[rustic rain]

Tbh not sure if I should try and write my own 2d renderer and animator xD

[solemn hollow]

but didnt u make that spacesim game?^^

[rustic rain]

Smth tells me focusing on game would be better

[solemn hollow]

i didnt think it would turn out 2D

[rustic rain]

It's different project

It was almost finished on classic unity

So I decided to finish it

But on ECS

xD

[solemn hollow]

"finished" ^^

[rustic rain]

Basically rewrite from scratch

It was literally almost finished

I only needed to finish UI, fix minor bugs and build it for android

And that would be released project kek

[robust scaffold]

Yea, that sounds like the issue i had. Havoc will be a problem when I attempt to implement multiplayer though

[solemn hollow]

but wait u wanted normal physX unity physics right? wouldnt u have the same problems?

[devout prairie]

Yeahh.. i think if UnityPhysics implemented sleeping the way Havok does it and a couple of other things it'd be golden tbh

[solemn hollow]

well sleeping isnt stateless i guess?

[devout prairie]

Not sure but i'm assuming he doesn't have his issue when sliding in physx

[devout prairie]

🤷‍♂️

[solemn hollow]

yes but physx is not stateless either. so also a problem for multiplayer as far as i understood

[robust scaffold]

Physics 2D uses geometric shapes for contact resolution, no issue with sliding

[solemn hollow]

but i never implemented a physics multiplayer so dont quote me here

[solemn hollow]

oh sry. physics2D again is sth diffrent. but still stateful

[robust scaffold]

yea... i guess no unrolling. What I want is no vibrations when moving along a surface

[devout prairie]

Anybody know how i'd recreate Quaternion.FromToRotation with Unity.Mathematics

[solemn hollow]

im pretty sure thats possible with unity physics package too. its just about the settings you chose. you could check out the car controller demo

[rustic rain]

Why are there vibrations in the first place? Is surface flat?

[solemn hollow]

IIRC it did feel smooth

[robust scaffold]

yea, it was just a box and a circle

[solemn hollow]

i mean its one of the most basic usecases of every physics package right? move along terrain

[rustic rain]

Rotation of x point looking at y point?

[rustic rain]

And how objects are moved?

[robust scaffold]

moving the circle against a fixed position box, pushing against it diagonally, resulted in the circle continuously repulsed.

[rustic rain]

Through force?

[robust scaffold]

WASD setting the XY plane velocity

[solemn hollow]

did you use continuous collision setting?

[robust scaffold]

Holding down the movement key against the box (moving the circle), resulted in the sphere "vibrating" against the surface of the box.

[robust scaffold]

IIRC, this was about a year or two ago, yes

[rustic rain]

I meant how you move it

As in

[robust scaffold]

WASD sets the velocity parameter of the circle rigidbody

[rustic rain]

What changes to what components

[robust scaffold]

Just that, very simple. I have a copy here but for physics 2D. Use it everywhere

[rustic rain]

Oh, it's classic 2d

[robust scaffold]

Except the velocity was a float3 because 3D, but the Z was 0.

yea, nothing fancy at all, very simple

My project is top down 2D, so there will be a lot of pushing against wall tiles when moving. If the collider vibrates against just a single box, it's not usable.

[devout prairie]

well i guess.. basically what's the math behind Quaternion.FromToRotation.. it just takes two rotations and returns the 'difference' or the rotation required to go from rot A to rot B

I have no idea the math behind it tho 😐

[rustic rain]

I don't know that function

Just asking what it does

[devout prairie]

yeahh

[rustic rain]

Cause I might know logic behind

If it takes 2 positions and returns wuat

Quat

[devout prairie]

takes two vectors ( 'directions' )

[rustic rain]

Then it's probably just
Euler(To - From)

[devout prairie]

yeah this is what i'm not sure, is it that simple 😐

i guess i could test and compare the results

[rustic rain]

To minus from is direction vector

And then Euler to convert into quat

[devout prairie]

yeah i mean if you minus one position from another, it'll give the direction

but in the case of working out the rotation between two direction vectors, not sure

if the math is as simple

this type of math is the black hole at the center of the galaxy for me 😛

[rustic rain]

It's not directions but positions

[rustic rain]

Oh

That's different

[devout prairie]

yeahh

[rustic rain]

Hmm

[devout prairie]

They should open up the code behind the old unity maths methods for the benefit of people transitioning to dots

[rustic rain]

I guess logic behind is creating quats for both

And doing matrix division

Not sure though

[devout prairie]

Yeh see that's the edge of the black hole for me

[robust scaffold]

You can just use the quad

does it have to be lowercase instead of upper?

[rustic rain]

Quat multiplication is rotation

X*y

X original rotation

Y is how you rotate it

[devout prairie]

ideally yeah

[rustic rain]

So you know Z - result rotation

And you might get it by division, but I'm not sure if that's a thing tbh

[devout prairie]

actually i was getting this error with upper case, which i wasn't getting in my managed version

[solemn hollow]

T_T :

[devout prairie]

so i figured screw it i need to bite the bullet and figure out how to do this without the helper method

[solemn hollow]

btw. my artist tried to build and it took 1,82 hrs... there is definitely sth broken or i use some very wrong pattern...

im done for today

[late mural]

hey trying to learn how to build with dots, and im following the manual's guide, but im having a hard time installing the windows build package, it just gives me errors, are there any dependencies?

[rotund token]

you do not use windows build package anymore

[late mural]

oh ok, guessing the manual is slightly outdated then?

[rotund token]

all the packages except the default build package are no longer used

and that is included in the dependencies for entities

what part of the manual tells you to get windows build package?

[late mural]

brb with a link to it

[rotund token]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.51/manual/ecs_building_projects.html

i don't see anything on here

[late mural]

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

[late mural]

wait im stupid ,this is outdated

[rotund token]

you're looking at 0.17

manual

when you did need it

[late mural]

yup.... only realised now...

thank you so much, sorry that im a bit of an idiot

is there anywhere in the manual that says how to set up the build configuration thing? As i cant seem to find anything about it and i have a bad feeling im missing something obvious....

[late mural]

hmm from more research i see that in 2021 the component menu is a pick a path situation, and you just guess and until you have what you want, but still what is needed for it i cannot find, im really missing something lol

ok found some samples on the github, gonna mess arround with them and see if i can get them working

ok i think i got it working, although new challenge, i need to work out how to add scenes to the build thingy, or somehow find the option that lets me build whatever scene i have open

ok it appears there is no information online about this, so ill have to trial and error until i find some weird way of making it work, although personally i am mildly annoyed that the manual had no info on how to build a dots project

[rotund token]

what's this?!

[rotund token]

there is a page on it now

you add a scene list

[late mural]

very little information from what i could tell, but still useful i suppose lol

[late mural]

how?

[rotund token]

add component

its just htat in 2021 the menu is broken

and you can't browse it

that's probably the problem you're having

[late mural]

yup, but the buttons still work atleast

[rotund token]

imo just load up a 2020 project and set it up

or simply import the one from the samples project

once components are added works fine

[late mural]

oh i did import from one of the sample projects, tried many, none of them are working, cause none of them have any scenes in them

[rotund token]

pretty sure it should have the scenelist on the build config though?

you just add your own scene

[late mural]

let me go check again brb

[rotund token]

like the manual image

[rustic rain]

Oh god, broken build asset

[late mural]

oh mine has no scene list, which tab is the scene list under so i can add it?

[rustic rain]

Still not fixed?

[late mural]

it works, ish, just you are not allowed to see

guess and check

but there is a simpler way

just use the search feature

which is basically not broken

say you want to add a scene list in the broken thing, as i figured out, you search "scene" and then click the top result, usually you get what you want

so the component thing, while it may look broken, it still works fine basically

[rustic rain]

Huh, that's a nice catch

[late mural]

lol

[rustic rain]

I used to brute force

And add all

Until run out of options xD

[late mural]

welp atleast you know now that you could have used search

tbh i used to do the same though lol

[rotund token]

this is what i use

[late mural]

lol

anyway, now that ive built it, where on earth in my file system would it have gone, as for some reason i couldnt find the location settings, so i just hope the default was good

[rotund token]

if you don't specify a path

i believe it's in project/Builds

at least that's where mine end up

[late mural]

that is what i thought, but that is an empty folder on my end

[rotund token]

not sure =S

[late mural]

yup that is how mine looks

[rotund token]

maybe last place previously built

[rotund token]

mines built though?

[late mural]

lol

[late mural]

hmm, ill hunt around then

[rotund token]

there is a component you can use to specify build output folder

just builds where i want it it to by default though

[late mural]

lucky lol

the weird thing is i found it, but it built an empty folder...

[rotund token]

sure it built successfully?

[late mural]

not sure, let me go check brb

i dont know, it didnt give me any errors like it used to, so i suppose it did good?

[rotund token]

it should error if it fails

did it at least say successfully built

[late mural]

it didnt say anything

ill try rebuilding

same result

[rotund token]

whats in your log

[late mural]

what log?

[rotund token]

you know

the unity console

where everything gets logged 😄

[late mural]

lol

nothing currently, other than unity complaining about some random fir tree not having the correct shader apparrently (i dont even have it in the scene)

[rotund token]

if it hasn't logged success or errored it hasn't built

what components are you using

[late mural]

these ones

[rotund token]

yeah thats not enough

[late mural]

oh, what do i need?

i just kinda copied the samples....

[rotund token]

pretty sure you need general settings

[late mural]

ok, ill grab that then

[rotund token]

and classic build profile, scene list - which you have

[late mural]

ok ive got it now, and ill rebuild and report back

ok it is giving me an error finally!!

appears to be something to do with dots compiler messing something up, gonna restart the editor and rebuild, and then ill report back!

[rotund token]

Turns out leaving it float, int even with the nice data struct burst can not vectorize it. Requires the float4/int4

From my experience this is very common

If you want to vectorize it, got to give it the right data

[late mural]

judging by how the build has taken over 12 minutes as of now, im guessing it is working, so yay thank you all so much!

[rotund token]

what's with everyones build taking so long =S

[late mural]

my computer is a tad ancient lol

[rotund token]

ah ok

manarz was having 50min+ builds =S

[late mural]

yikes, i hope mine doesnt take that long

i wonder why building dots takes so much longer than non-dots?

[rotund token]

i don't know

Build Win-ClientServer succeeded after 1.30m.

my dots project only takes 1min 30

[late mural]

woah lucky

[rotund token]

il2cpp

let me clear the incremental build

[late mural]

as someone who isnt famillier with that stuff, what is the difference between the llpc2 or whatever it is called and the other build options?

[rotund token]

as the name suggests il2cpp is basically converting il 2 cpp 😄

[late mural]

aha, that means nothing to me, other than cpp which is c++ id assume?

[summer pilot]

note, il2cpp: Intermediate Language to C++

[late mural]

oh thank you lol, dont know what exactly that means, but atleast it is clear that it is something

[rotund token]

are you familiar with how c# traditionally works under mono or .net ?

[summer pilot]

if you want more info, https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html
its very interesting 👀

[late mural]

not really, but someday ill probably go learn

[late mural]

ooh nice, ill check that out some time

woah from reading that, that sounds cool!

[rotund token]

.net includes the CLR (common language runtime) which is the execution engine.

programs written for .net (e.g. using c#) don't compile into machine code, instead they compile into CIL (common intermediate language code) and execute JIT (just in time) converting CIL to machine code depending on architecture.

[late mural]

ooh fascinating!

thanks all for teaching me such intriguing stuffs!

that sentence did not have good grammar, but i couldn't figure out a better way to structure it lol

[rotund token]

think of mono as an alternative

and it's what powers the editor

and why you can recompile quickly in editor and just jump into game

[late mural]

oh ok cool!

[rotund token]

il2cpp on the other hand converts the intermediate language to c++ then compiles it natively

just reading that should make you understand why it takes longer

but il2cpp can produce much faster code than the old mono found in unity

the other important reason it exists is certain platforms don't support JIT only AOT (ahead of time) compiling

e.g. IOS

anyway i'm no expert on this but it should give you a basic idea of it

[late mural]

wow, that is fascinating, thank you so much for teaching me this stuff lol

[rustic rain]

Il2cpp is nearly impossible to mod sadly

[rotund token]

not really true

there's good injectors on it now

people modded our game within a week

even unlocked our dev console (whoops, forgot to disable that)

[late mural]

lol

[rustic rain]

Decompiled code is absolute worst to read

With il2cpp

[rotund token]

it's hard to read source, sure, but you can get all contracts easy enough

this is my dump of v-rising contracts which uses il2cpp

for example

[rustic rain]

Uugh

I just wish Unity will update to 6.0 net

[rotund token]

that said

it comes a lot down the developer - it's obviously going to be a lot easier if you provide info

{
    // Fields
    private Dictionary<ComponentSystemBase, PerformanceRecorderSystem.RecordingKey> _Recording; // 0x18
    private Stopwatch _Stopwatch; // 0x20
    private bool _IsThisSystemRecording; // 0x28
    public static bool StaticRecordingEnabled; // 0x0
    private static int _JobWorkerCount; // 0x4```

like you can see all fields in systems

decompiling il2cpp has got pretty good

[solar spire]

They're making the necessary steps to update internally, it'll just be a while

[rustic rain]

I'm not sure what would be a good pattern for making game that is meant to be modded. Make it il2cpp but leak source?

What would be downside for leaking source though?

[rotund token]

a good moddable entities game shouldn't even need source

you just need to know the contracts

now will we see this case anytime soon? probably not

[late mural]

build in a file perhaps that just interprets each line as a line for a dev console which can spawn and do whatever

could make it easy to mod then for people

[rustic rain]

I assume that's because of SRP pattern on systems?

[rotund token]

if you design it so systems are only controlled by data with no coupling

then you can really do anything just by manipulating data

now doing that is very very hard

but it's a dream!

[rustic rain]

Yeah, that's what I am aming for at this point

Previously I would use some inter system methods

But I soon realized how bad it is

State entities really help with that

RequireSingleton makes things so much easier and fluent

[solemn hollow]

why is coupling systems a problem for mods? for modding in systems by providing data?

[rotund token]

it just complicates it

[solemn hollow]

ah harder for the modder to understand the contract?

[rotund token]

if you're only looking at contracts (say, system names and data structs)

how can i know what weird setup i need to do to override your system

i can't just go in and turn off your calculate stat system etc

and replace it with my own

[solemn hollow]

i see. so youd say chains of systems running on data would already be coupling systems?

say your stat system is actually a ssystemgroup

[rotund token]

it depends - like it makes sense to pass data between systems

maybe you only want to override 1 part of a pipeline of systems

that is a great way of modding

but if i can't do this without calling some impossible to find method on a second system

or worse - the second system depends on a native container from the first system

how can i easily modify this behaviour

[solemn hollow]

hmm i didndt do this for moddability but for my own quick refactoring needs but i dont pass any containers between systems ever atm. all is passed through the ECS structure

thats why i wondered what you mean by coupling. cause i thought not coupling things was the easy not so performant way

[rotund token]

modability doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with performance

[solemn hollow]

skyrim T_T

i mean when you and enzi talk performance its probably like 100x faster than how i do things but dots is still sick in even my case.

[rotund token]

i'm very heavy about the data driven and moddability atm

[solemn hollow]

yeah out of intuition id say the effectssystem you showed would be easy to mod and is fully datadriven. even though you have this EffectsDataMemoryBlock

[chilly crow]

effectssystem 👀

[rotund token]

yeah so i'm designing my systems very cleaning with write filters

[solemn hollow]

haha i think everybody needs one right now ^^

[rotund token]

ok i swear to god its random

[solemn hollow]

why was this bot added...

[rotund token]

write groups setup

very specific behaviour per system

but honestly, these systems would probably not need to be modded

better off just modding in custom effects/conditions

which imo is the best way to mod!

just data

[solemn hollow]

i never fully understood writegroups TBH

never really bothered too

[rustic rain]

they are cool

let you kind of create some sort of abstraction in components

[rotund token]

unity has a good color example these days imo

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.51/manual/ecs_write_groups.html

the tldr is someone can create a component that my system doesn't know about that my system will now use in the WithNone part of the query

so if they add that component to an entity, my system will no longer run

and instead they can have a system to implement alternate behaviour

[solemn hollow]

and how do they declare that their component is part of another write group?

[rotund token]

[WriteGroup(ComponentType)]

on their component

[chilly crow]

woah that's pretty cool

[solemn hollow]

[WriteGroup(NotMyControlledComponent)]
MyComponent

[rotund token]

a simple example, your game has no stealth mechanic but someone wants to come in and mod your game and add one

lets say you have a footstep system that shows footsteps on the ground, plays audio etc. well if it was a writegroup, they could make a stealth component and make it target say FootStepComponent and stop your footstep system running while the entity is stealthed

they've added a stealth override with 1 attribute to your systems even though you never built it into the game

i think write groups are the ultimate modding tool

[solemn hollow]

i see. so i should declare writegroups for the components my system writes to

[rotund token]

they only work on things in a query with readwrite

so thats automatic you just need to mark your query as that

the entire unity transform system has write groups enable

[solemn hollow]

but to make that more understandable id probably only want to have 1 systemoutputcomponent?

[rotund token]

so you can override how transforms are built

[rotund token]

thats not really a requirement

im only using small systems atm because they're ISystem

and i'm experimenting on this effect/attribute system with ISystem and seeing how pure i can make my ecs code

[solemn hollow]

So all i need to do is add the Filter and unity figures out which components are written to and thus the writegroup applies to?

[rotund token]

pretty much

[solemn hollow]

did you ever find a usecase for yourself to use writegroups to like split entity processing to two diffrent systems?

i mean is it an architecture tool outside of modding purposes? sounds like it might reduce some needs for WithNone and WithAll

[rotund token]

i've used them a couple of times

1 specific collection of systems at work

for determining how entities spawn in world

1 default spawn rules, then separate overring behaviour with write groups

[solemn hollow]

yeah i could see that used as some kind of factory pattern maybe

and does it have any performance implications to add the filter to just any query?

[rotund token]

ive never measured it

but as far as i'm aware the cost is in typemanager initialization

as well as when the query is created

which is 99.9999% done in OnCreate

i don't believe there should be any per frame cost

though again, never measured it

[solemn hollow]

makes sense though

[rotund token]

basically once query is setup it should be no different

[solemn hollow]

i wonder why unity skipped adding the filter for alot of their systems

companiontransfomupdate comes to mind...

[rotund token]

forgotten feature

i'm the only one who remembers it 😄

~brb 20 cooking dinner

[devout prairie]

That's interesting.. so people writing burstable code are missing out on the benefits of vectorization/simd completely if they dont pack the data themselves first

[rotund token]

actually i just managed to make it generate the same code

but it requires some attributes

[solemn hollow]

hmm just yesterday i watched the low level development with burst talk. there should be autovectorization for it

https://youtu.be/BpwvXkoFcp8?t=942

with timestamp for autovec

[rotund token]

it's interesting though, even though it generated exact same burst code for the loop it still runs a little slowly

[solemn hollow]

thats 2019 though

[rotund token]

0.21 vs 0.24ms

[solemn hollow]

huh

[rotund token]

i think there's a bit more overhead setting up the loop

but yeah i could get both cases to generate this

exact same burst code

(looks beautiful doesn't it!)

but yeah again it's very fickle

so i'll stick with float/int 4 version

it's just as readable

[solemn hollow]

so did i understand correctly that you can just take a nativearray of float and reinterpret it as an array of float4?

[rotund token]

yes

so 1 catch of vectorization, you can only do it in a single loop

if your arrays are a multiple of 4

for obvious reasons if you think about it

otherwise it takes a second loop of 0-3 elements

[solemn hollow]

well in autovectorizers it handles the rest too right

[solemn hollow]

this i mean

[rotund token]

i've seen it handled but a lot of the time it just doesn't vectorize

i basically got this working by simply telling burst that the length was always a multiple of 4

[solemn hollow]

hence the attributes u mentioned?

[rotund token]

i just used Hint.Assume for that

but i needed some [NoAlias] attributes

and a few other things (cant remember)

[devout prairie]

Yeah I was thinking maybe just force the array to be x4 and then discard the unused data

[rotund token]

yeah that's what i'm doing

[devout prairie]

So I guess it still works out faster

[rotund token]

the one thing that is bothering me is
Unity.Burst.CompilerServices.Loop.ExpectVectorized();
i just can't get this to work

my loop is clearly vectorized

i think this is not working because it's already vectorized - llvm doesn't actually have to do anything

at least that's my best guess

but i can pretty much never get this to work except in the most basic of loops

[devout prairie]

I was reading UninitializedMemory yesterday i take it that's also quicker when creating arrays inside a job as opposed to during oncreate

[rotund token]

i really wish i had a reliable check to make sure something/someone doesn't break my nice loops

[rotund token]

just avoids a MemClear

i'm going to populate the entire thing after allocating it, why bother doing a clear

[devout prairie]

Seems kinda pointless in any case

I guess unless you are copying from another array or something

Or could the allocated memory potentially have data in it already and cause corruption