“Try something simple like a game jam, a Tetris, Tic-Tac-Toe – it doesn’t really matter – just complete a game in ECS before you have a whole team go into production with art and all that.
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You can adopt it gradually, and even by doing the small things you’ll get a big performance boost, especially with code reusability.”Īs well, Smith recommends doing a prototype project before going into full production.
“You don’t have to go ‘all in’ with ECS at first. He has some solid advice for other studios too. I think at this point, everyone in the studio gets it – we love it, actually – and we’ll probably be doing all our future games with ECS,” said Smith. “Once I got the hang of ECS, it started to come along pretty easily. Tic Toc’s transition to a data-oriented approach was tentative at first, but it was a fun challenge to take on. Watch Mike Geig’s 5-part Intro to the Entity Component System (ECS) and C# Job System. Most go unused, but DOTS takes full advantage of them all. Today, mainstream CPUs have up to 4-6 physical and 8-12 logical cores, while “enthusiast” CPUs have up to 16 physical and 32 logical cores.
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Simply because of the way data is organized, it’s easier to write optimized code – thus the tagline, “ Performance by default.” Smith added, “Some of the doors that ECS opened showed us how to make better algorithms.” In addition, ECS code is highly reusable, archetypes (unique entities) are tightly packed in memory, and perhaps most importantly, ECS can take advantage of increasing numbers of CPU cores. The benefits of using ECS are significant. According to Mike Geig, Unity’s Global Head of Evangelism Content, “Once it clicks, it’s pretty easy to wrap your head around it.” This separation of data and function lets Unity create jobs that can be processed in parallel on multiple cores. The system applies a function to an entity, such as a motion system to a bullet or a spawning system to a player. The entities and the attributes are pure data with no attached functionality.
It decouples data from processing, eliminating an enormous amount of data scattering and enables true multithreading as events no longer have to be processed sequentially.įor example, two entities might be a bullet and a player, each with references to different attributes like position, spawning, and health data. Even for us, there was a little bit of fear about starting something new.” However, what they accomplished with ECS made them believers.Ħ0 fps on mobile devices without CPUs overheatingįewer iterations and less troubleshooting/bug-fixingĮCS replaces object-oriented coding with a data-oriented approach much more appropriate for many parts of gaming applications.
“Working with ECS, it’s definitely a different way of coding than what people are used to,” Smith noted, “Data-oriented programming is not taught in school much, so it’s a major paradigm shift. With several high-profile puzzle releases due in 2019, including a Match 3 and a Collapse game, Smith committed his team to leveraging ECS in particular. Garth Smith, Tic Toc’s lead programmer, put it more elegantly: “We need to make better games, faster.” He’s a long-time Unity user, and finds some of the major new features in Unity 2018.x remarkably powerful. They’ve used Unity since they began creating games in 2011.Īs with any game company, Tic Toc is always looking for ways to get better performance out of its code and, at the same time, iterate faster on design. They want their players to love the game while they are playing, think about it when they are not playing, share their enthusiasm with their friends, and return to play again and again. Tic Toc Games is a full-service developer with a seasoned staff of artists, designers, programmers and production managers, all of whom have shipped award-winning interactive products.
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