5argon

Unity's made a big move to a new disruptive programming paradigm "Entities Component System" (ECS), or now collectively called with other technologies as Data Oriented Tech Stack (DOTS). You don't see any other game engine dares to do it since it throws you off the comfort zone of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with its new database design for your objects. (Now called Entity) Still, this is how the game should be made since this data structure fits many things we do in game development, namely, what it do the best is iteration. In games, we are always iterating through something and accessing just a subset of fields from that. In OOP you suffer from the most common thing you do on every step, on every elements accessed. With ECS, you could unlock "new" performance where you wouldn't able to optimize any further with OOP, since this memory related issue is tied with the `new` keyword and you couldn't go in and optimize that `new`. I think many company do know data-oriented design is the way to go, but they would have trouble reconciling with users and might impact user base and revenue. I am surprised that Unity take this step forward. (And no surprise that in the forum, Unity received countless complains about how difficult it is to get this performance.) I have been with this ECS package from very early days. I thought, this is the first time in my life that I can't just Google and beat everything like I used to do for decades, since there is nothing about this on the internet yet. I decided to write some ECS articles on <a href="https://gametorrahod.com/tag/unity-ecs/">https://gametorrahod.com/tag/unity-ecs/ </a>First I wrote them so that I could look it up again later for what I learn, also I notice I myself learn faster when writing along (just like in high school days). Many area requires source code digging, since Unity don't have time to make a documentation for a preview package like this and it is difficult to go through them again. Later I feel like this might become a beacon for future generations when the package somehow could become the mainstream way of game making. (I hope that will be the case) In the analytics I put on the website, it is indeed the case that someone are reading these articles. I think it is a great feeling, so I would to continue doing it as the API evolves. This patreon is a support channel. I don't have any tier incentives for you guys to write x amount of articles per month, but I do write them regularly anyways if you look at timestamps for each articles. But here in Patreon I could update on what I am researching more regularly. At the same time you could discuss and we together may find some area that needs more research, that I could write more articles about it. And I could also post some links to in-draft articles for the Patrons. About open source Unity repository, currently I am maintaining <a href="https://github.com/5argon/NotchSolution">Notch Solution</a>, a solution to solve the phone cutout problems for all which currently is gaining traction and is helping many developers while Unity team still not providing built-in solution yet. Along with that <a href="https://github.com/5argon/protobuf-unity">protobuf-unity</a> is one another of my repo that is quite popular, which helps you serialize and design Protobuf coded data in Unity. Thank you, and may your game have a good performance!