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Unity DOTS vs Handbuilt: Sample Project
Nick Caston
11K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 2 people: 1 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
- Presented by Nick Caston
- Linked in the descriptionUnityTechnologies/AngryBots_ECSntcaston/AngryGL
- May be out of date. Uploaded 6 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
686K views6 years ago2 recommendations
Game developmentGraphics and audioUnity, Unreal and GodotBuilding a game enginePerformance and optimization
Nick Caston compares the performance and development effort of a Unity ECS/DOTS sample project against a custom-built C++ and OpenGL clone.
Comparison between one of Unity's sample ECS/DOTS projects, and a "from scratch" cloned implementation using C++ and OpenGL. Bringing some data to the game engine discussions. Custom game engine vs Unity DOTS! Unity sample project repo: github.com/UnityTechnologies/AngryBots_ECS C++ clone source: github.com/ntcaston/AngryGL You can watch me live stream game development at twitch.tv/nickcaston OpenGL® and the oval logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. "Unity", Unity logos, and other Unity trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere. The stylized “C++” logo is a trademark of the Standard C++ Foundation.Why it's here
2 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as a practical comparison of the performance overhead and development trade-offs between commercial game engines and custom-built engines.
jokoonon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Godot 3.2”
If one doesn't understand how a game works, a framework is not going to help. This person will probably shoot himself in the foot. Here is a good video about benchmarking unity link to this video
jokoonon Hacker News • Recommends
On “What Unity Is Getting Wrong”
A great demonstration of how unity is bloated: link to this video Unity is targeting students and gamedev wannabees. You don't make a game with a framework. Programming is not simple. Same debate of framework vs libraries. I'm even against Godot, which you cannot even use as a rendering library. You end up being too dependent on those platforms and all their assets and plugins. Of course if you intend to make a game that's not too ambitious, if it revolves around the graphics, unity might be ok, but it's just a sophisticated RPG maker 3D. I strongly advise against learning unity or godot. A huge problem is that unity/unreal made it difficult for classic engines/renderers to keep thriving, and it's hard…
u/GoldenDvckin r/gameenginedevs • Mentions
…** initially seemed promising, but after seeing benchmarks comparing DOTS to custom-built solutions (C++/OpenGL), the performance gap was stark. The custom solution vastly outperformed DOTS, even without ECS libraries, though at the cost of higher development effort (e.g., implementing features like shadows, lighting, and animations from scratch). link to this video
My Plan:
I’m leaning toward building a custom engine for the main game, leveraging existing libraries and frameworks where possible. The smaller base defense game made in Unity will serve as a stepping stone, allowing me to refine systems and potentially secure funding to hire a team for the custom engine.
Key Requirements:
Here are the…
jokoonon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Godot 3.2”
I tried to learn it a little but I did not manage to understand how it works, I don't really like the whole WYSIWYG thing, it forces the developer to surrender control, and you waste a big amount of time teaching yourself how it works internally, time that could be spent being productive with a simple renderer. It also seems to support c++ as "gdnative", although it requires another compiler to link against godot's binaries. It seems awkward because you still need to use the godot editor, and there is still a lot of interfacing to write. It seems like a good alternative to unity, but in the end, all I want is an engine, not a "framework" or some awkward scene editor with some kind of Node hi…
jokoonon Hacker News • Mentions
On ““I made an operating system UI within Unity””
Here is an analysis of unity's performance link to this video My take on your comment is that the problem of electron is that it uses HTML.
jokoonon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Create a First-Person Shooter In Godot”
I never managed to like unity or godot because they remove freedom from the developer. Your code becomes a second class citizen. Apparently level design people and artists like it, which makes sense, of course, since indie gamedevs and small teams who are full of ideas and content, want to work as quickly as possible. But as a developer, I just loathe those tools. They sort of make sense for non-developers who want to make a prototype game and "tweak" things by writing as little code as possible while getting bleeding edge graphics. In reality it just enables unambitious projects so that "anybody can make games". It's like comparing LEGO to mechanical engineering. Of course, if you're pedant…
qayxcon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Stride Game Engine”
Let's not guess and simply checkout a fair comparison, like this gentleman did: link to this video From his perspective as an experienced developer, it took 3.4x more effort to implement a very basic project versus using a fully featured engine. And that's ignoring the editor part, not to forget. I'd call a factor of 3.4 quite significant. In more general terms, it's the difference between actually finishing a game in a 3½ months vs a full year. In other words, you could finish 3 projects in the time it takes you to fully handcraft one, with the added advantage of OOTB multi-platform support. So reality seems to disagree with your "not really saving you that much much time" assumption. It's the small c…
ajconwayon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday”
> In many cases, this software doesn't even do anything that is functionally different from 10 or 20 years ago, but it still consumes many more resources I would argue that in most cases the choice is not between fast, optimized and slow, unoptimized software. The choice is between having a functioning program (using a universal, "reasonably" efficient stack) and not having one at all (because the amount of resources it takes to develop a customized, low-level implementation is prohibitively high). A good example: link to this video A custom 3D engine performs immensely better than a comparable Unity project, but it took the author 3 to 4 times the effort.
KronisLVon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?”
…een much faster in regards to time to market. Similar differences show up when you try to build the same project, once while using an engine and another without it, the performance can be much better if you write your own optimized code (supposing that you can do so in the first place), however the development still takes much longer, for example: link to this video Now, whether that matters to you or not is a different matter entirely: some care about learning a lot more about the lower level stuff, others just want to develop games and care more about the art/story/etc., while others care about selling them ASAP.…