Seba's Lab

Svelto.ECS 3.0 is officially out, let’s find out what’s new.

Previously, in Svelto.ECS, it was possible to query entity components directly as a managed array, which would have resulted in the fastest way to iterate over the components in c#. Since Svelto.ECS 3.0 and because now the framework supports natively native memory as well, I decided to remove this possibility

With the approaching third major release, Svelto.ECS internals have been overhauled to support Burst and native memory (among other features that I will discuss in different articles). The idea to support native memory in a c# framework is counter intuitive, but Burst is such an incredible piece of technology that

I had two interesting problems to solve during the development of Svelto.ECS, which in short are: Set an implemented property of a struct, but only when the struct implements a specific interface, from a generic method and without casting the struct to the interface Assign an object to a field

The Unity Package Manager is a good effort from Unity to distribute project dependencies similarly to what NPM does. UPM is still in its infancy and some problems are to be addressed, among them the conflicts arising from common .net dll is the problem that annoys me the most. Currently,

Being busy on multiple fronts, I recently went AWOL from this blog, but Svelto is keeping up well with the new technologies (read Unity DOTS) and we are actively developing it for our new game Gamecraft. I am also spending my little spare time to develop Svelto 3.0, which will

Introduction: The Svelto.ECS methods designed to implement ECS based GUIs are simple and powerful, following the fundamental principles around the whole Svelto implementation. Their design doesn’t involve use of callbacks, as it relies on the power of Svelto.Tasks (but you can achieve similar results with other patterns like async/await) and

Welcome back! It’s some time that Svelto ECS 2.8 is actually ready, as it has been used at Freejam for quite a while now (yep, we are developing Robocraft Experiments with it) and as the list of tasks for SECS 2.9 is growing, it was time to write this article

08/04/2019 Note: this article is quite old (pre SECS 2.5) but since I ported the example to Svelto 2.8 (beta version at the time of this note), I updated this article as well, although it is still missing some important details related to the new features that ship with the

Note: this article is not maintained. The mini example Doofuses has a third and final iteration for a long time now and it is what all my new articles refer to when talking about this example. Iteration 3 enhances the code using Burst and Jobs. After finishing writing my previous

can Svelto.ECS be used with UnityECS? Is the Unity Job system really better than Svelto.Tasks? Let’s see it.

Svelto ECS 2.7 is out, let’s see what’s new: Exclusive Groups, new SwapEntityGroup and RemoveEntity and new Sequencer.

Svelto ECS so far… Svelto.ECS wasn’t born just from the needs of a large team, but also as result of years of reasoning behind software engineering applied to game development(*). Compared to Unity.ECS the main goals and reasons for Svelto.ECS to exist are different enough to justify its on going development (plus Svelto is

[11/03/2018] : added Unity Jobs System version and updated timings. Please check at the end of the article. With my previous article on Svelto.Tasks and multi-threaded cache friendly code, I failed to show visually the power of Svelto.Tasks because I didn’t know how to upload a huge amount of data

There are several reasons why programmers have a hard time to wrap their heads around ECS concepts. Having learned to code with an OOP centric language is one of them. Being ECS so far from the Object-Oriented design makes things more difficult to who have already a hard time to

Premise In this potentially controversial article, I will explain why I believe ECS is a great paradigm to write simpler to mantain (and therefore less expensive) code and I will also try to explore the idea to formalise best practices through the application of the SOLID principles, which at glance

note: Svelto.ECS is now production ready, so you can start to use it after finishing reading the articles. At this point, I can imagine someone wondering if I still recommend to use an IoC container. IoC containers are handy and are quite powerful with Unity Engine, but they are dangerous.

The Dependency Inversion Principle is part of the SOLID principles. If you want a formal definition of DIP, please read the articles written by Martin[1] and Schuchert[2]. We explained that, in order to invert the control of the flow, our specialized code must never call directly methods of more abstracted

In the previous article I explained what the Inversion of Control principle is, then I introduced the concept of Inversion of Flow control. In this article I will illustrate how to apply it properly, even without using an IoC container. In order to do so, I will talk about Entity

Note: this article assumes you already read my previous articles on IoC containers and the Part I Inversion of Control is another concept that turns out to be very simple once it has been fully processed or rather saying “absorbed”. Absorbed as going over being understood and becoming part of

Note: this article series assumes you have already read my previous articles on IoC containers. There is an evil truth behind the concept of Inversion of Control container. An unspoken code tragedy taking place everyday while passing unnoticed. Firm in my intentions to stop this shame, I decided to stand

Note: this article explains the use of my old IoC container in more details. However I long stopped using it and its now deprecated, so read it for knowledge, but know that I now recommend to use an IoC container only to develop games as the ECS paradigm doesn’t need

Unity is a good game development tool and honestly I like most of its features. However the code framework is awkward to use on big projects where code maintainability is of fundamental importance. As you may have guessed, the following considerations in this article do not apply to simple projects

Note: this is an article dedicated to the windows platform. What am I going to show may or may not apply to other platforms. Those pesky native crashes If you are a long term unity developer, it must have happened to you: Unity suddenly closes itself and shows the dreaded

For the game I am currently developing, Gamecraft, we are using Svelto.ECS for the game logic, Unity ECS for the physic and GPUInstancer compute shader pipeline for the rendering. I have never had the time to benchmark the UECS rendering pipeline against the GPUInstancer one, mainly because I decided directly

I promised myself to not write new articles until Svelto.ECS 3.0 is out, however a recent tweet asking about how to achieve zero allocation code in Unity inspired me to write a short piece about the importance of memory allocation in c# and game development that I previously planned as

Finally I found the time to play with unmanaged arrays and Memory<T>/Span<T>. In order to investigate possible improvements of the data structures used by Svelto.ECS, I wanted to know what the fastest way to set elements in a preallocated array could be. Using the very powerful BenchmarkDotNet and with the

For a long time I wanted to make some experiments with Photon Network Engine at home. During my professional experience, I worked on several multiplayer games, therefore I was pretty curious about it. Exit Games provides two versions of Photon Network Engine: the traditional Photon Server edition and the new Photon Cloud

knowing how short my memory is, I saved all my professional life memories in a folder on my HD. Some of those memories are meaningful only to me, but why not sharing my first, completed game (yeahh it was 1997…I think) ? The version I am linking is actually the