What is ECS? 2018.2 Release Summary

John talks about the 2018.2 release and a big beta/upcoming feature called ECS (Entity Component System).

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Show Notes

Unity® 2018.2 is now available! (as of July 10th, 2018)

Unity®'s blog post about the 2018.2 release

183 improvements and 1426 fixes

Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) improvements

SRP batcher

Scriptable shader variants stripping

Lightweight Render Pipeline (Preview)

High Definition Render Pipeline (Preview)

Progressive Lightmapper

Shader Graph (Preview), including High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) support

Texture Mipmap Streaming

Vulkan support for Editor on Windows and Linux (experimental)

C# Animation Jobs

Particle System improvements

2D improvements!!! Including Pixel Perfect Camera (Preview package), 2D Sprite Renderer "Sort by Pivot Point", 2D Hexagonal Tilemaps, SVG Importer (Preview package), New 2D APIs

Including Pixel Perfect Camera (Preview package), 2D Sprite Renderer "Sort by Pivot Point", 2D Hexagonal Tilemaps, SVG Importer (Preview package), New 2D APIs Support for using .java and .cpp source files as plugins in a Unity project

Standard Assets replacement

Unity Hub

Cinematics, including Camera Physical Properties, Recorder 1.0

High-DPI monitor support

C# Job System, Entity Component System and Burst Compiler

IL2CPP-Managed Debugger

Scripting runtime improvements

End of support for UnityScript

Visual Studio Code Debugger Extension

XR - HoloLens Holographic Remoting

Unity® Job System / ECS / Burst Compiler

Unity® Job System / ECS Feature Page

Demo: Unite Austin 2017 - Massive Battle in the Spellsouls Universe

Main parts of ECS:

New C# Job System

Entity Component System (ECS)

Burst Compiler

How does it work?

Entities are an index for referencing data

Component Data separates out data and allows for linear data/memory layout

Component Systems handle all logic and operations

C# Job System takes advantage of linear memory layout and multiple cores

Burst Compiler produces more optimized code

Benefits

Performance by default

Data-oriented programming

Makes small games more efficient

Methods for making Unity Games:

Old model (Game Objects)

Hybrid ECS - Provides upgrade path to full ECS along with minor optimization's by avoiding virtual calls.

Pure ECS - Full performance and other benefits of ECS.

Principles

Performance by default

Determinism

Networking guidance

Build size and Load time

Fast iteration time (under 500ms) (hot reloading)

Tested

Packages, collaboration, transparency

Unity ECS Talks from GDC 2018/Unite 2017:

This episode features parts of the song "Air Hockey Saloon" by Chris Zabriskie, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

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