#ECS is fun, but the Unity DX is not and creates a huge cost

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charred elm
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4 months ago I tried out ECS and it's been really fun. I'm not here for the 10s of thousands of entities, I'm here for the architecture and fun way of building a game.

But I'm struggling with the developer experience. Progress is slow. Fast iteration times don't exist. Domain reloads and whatever else is happening in the editor kill the fun. And I don't even have a real game that does more than spawn a few entities.

I come from writing in langauge <x> where the toolchain is really fast and the DX is amazing (I don't need to say what <x> is, I'm not advocating for it here). The cost has been minimised: Programs compile almost instantly, you can run test suites almost instantly and they are fast, code formatting tools run almost instantly, you don't have to add asmdefs to the right places to tell the compiler what to do.

I've been following along in the DOTS discord for a while and I've seen others post concerns about iteration times, so I don't think it's just me having a bad setup or something. One user mentioned as a workaround they batch a bunch of their changes together so they can minimise the cost of waiting.

I know Unity is probably aware of some specific issues, but I'm wondering how aware is Unity of the actual cost here? 100s or 1000s of developers every day are waiting around while they wait for the editor to do something. What if what took me 4 months to do instead took 2 months? Would developers ship games twice as fast? Faster? Maybe this cost doesn't actually exist and Unity experts just know how to get stuff done.

What is the plan to make the DX of Unity better? For me it's a DOTS question because I think with better Unity DX the uptake and success of DOTS could be huge. Without better DX I sometimes I wonder if it's worth me spending so much of my life waiting around, or if I should just move on.

bronze temple
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Great question! Iteration speed is something we're painfully aware of and working on improving. That said here's a few tricks:

The key one is, we recommend setting these:

image.png
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And as you said yourself, a good strat is:

batch a bunch of their changes together so they can minimise the cost of waiting
(it can help to turn off Asset refresh in Preferences>Asset Pipeline>Auto Refresh)

You can also turn off burst until your game actually needs it for performance reasons (most importantly, turning off Jobs>Synchronous Compilation is a speed bump)

charred elm
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Thanks for the reply! Yep I have the enter play mode settings as above. And also asmdefs structured like the sample projects (Authoring and Components and systems all in separate assemblies). Thanks for the other two suggestions, and good luck with the push to reduce this cost ❤️

slim lance
# bronze temple Great question! Iteration speed is something we're painfully aware of and workin...

It's great to hear you guys are at least aware of some of these issues, to kindof reflect what @charred elm has said above it's really easy to think 'am i doing something wrong, are other users experiencing this' but after around 2 years of DOTS development experience ( and having tried at least the most common approaches to getting around some of these problems ) i can safely say no it's not just me the editor is slow.