What is Unity’s new Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS)

If we look at the evolution of computing and gaming over the last decade, we can see how different things are with respect to ten years ago. However, one of the most significant change was moving from a world where 90% of the code ran on a single thread on a single core, to a world where we all carry in our pockets hundreds of GPU cores, and we must design efficient code that can run in parallel. If we look at this change, we can imagine why Unity feels the urge to adapt to this new paradigm. Unity’s original design born in a different era, and now it is time for it to adjust to the future. The Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) is the collective name for Unity's attempt at reshaping its internal architecture in a way that is faster, lighter, and, more important, optimized for the current massive multi-threading world.

In this article, we will take a look at the main three components of DOTS and how it can help you develop next-generation games.

Want to learn more optimization techniques in Unity?

Unity engine comes with a great set of features to help you build high-performance games. If you want to know the techniques for writing better game scripts and learn how to optimize a game using Unity technologies such as ECS and the Burst compiler, read the book Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition written by Chris Dickinson and Dr. Davide Aversa. This book will help you get up to speed with a series of performance-enhancing coding techniques and methods that will help you improve the performance of your Unity applications.

The Data-Oriented Technology Stack

Three components compose the Data-Oriented Technology Stack:

The Entity Component System (ECS)

The C# Job System

The Burst compiler

Let's see each one of them.

The Entity Component System (ECS)

If you know Unity, you know that two basic structures represent every part of a game: the GameObject and the MonoBehavior. Every GameObject contains one or more MonoBehavior, which in turn describes the data (what the object knows) and the behavior (what the object does) of each element in a scene.

GameObject and MonoBehavior worked well during Unity’s initial years; however, with the rise of multithreaded programming, many issues with the GameObject architecture started to become more evident.

First of all, a GameObject is a fat, heavy, data structure. In theory, it should only be a container of MonoBehavior instances. In practice, instead, it has a significant number of problems. To name a few:

Every GameObject has a name and an ID.

Every GameObject has a C# wrapping object pointing to the native C++ code

Creating and deleting a GameObject requires to lock and edit a global list (that is, these operations cannot run in parallel).

Moreover, both GameObject and MonoBehavior are dynamic objects, and they are stored everywhere in memory. It would be much better if we could keep all the MonoBehavior of a GameObject close to each other so that finding and running them would be more efficient.

To solve all these issues, Unity introduced the Entity Component System (ECS), a new paradigm alternative to the traditional GameObject/MonoBehavior one.

As the name suggests, there are three elements in ECS:

Components: They are conceptually similar to a MonoBehavior, but they contain only data. For instance, a Position component will contain only a 3D vector representing the entity position in space; a LinearVelocity component would contain only the velocity of the object, and so on. They are just plain data.

Entities: They are just a “collection” of components. For example, if I have a particle in space, I can represent it just with the list of components, e.g., Position and LinearVelocity components.

System: A system is where the behavior is. Each system takes a list of components and executes a function over all the entities composed by the components of the archetype.

[box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]To be technically correct, an entity is not a collection data structure. Instead, it is a pointer to a location in memory where the entity’s components are stored. The actual storage, though, is handled by Unity.[/box]

With this system, we can store components into contiguous arrays, and an entity is just a pointer to the archetype instance. A single function for each system can define the behavior of thousands of similar entities. This is more efficient than running an Update on every MonoBehavior in every GameObject.

For this reason, with ECS, we can use entities without any slowdown or system overhead where it was impossible with GameObject instances. For instance, having an entity for each particle of a particle system.

For more technical info on ECS there is a very detailed blog post on Unity’s official website.

The C# Job System

If ECS is how we describe the scene, we need a way to run the systems efficiently. As we said in the introduction, the modern approach to efficiency is to exploit every core in our system, and this means to run code in parallel using massive multithreaded systems.

Sadly, multi-threading is hard. Extremely hard. As any experienced developer can tell you, moving from single-thread to multi-thread programming introduce a large class of new issues and bugs such as race conditions. Moreover, for true multi-threading, we should go as much close as possible to the metal, avoiding all the dynamic allocations and deallocations of C# and the Garbage Collector and code part of our game in C++.

Luckily for us, Unity introduced a component in Data-Oriented Technology Stack with the specific purpose of simplifying multithreaded programming in Unity using only C#: the Job System.

You can imagine a Job as a piece of code that you want to run in parallel over as much cores as possible. The Unity C# Job System helps you design this code in a way to avoid all common multi-threading pitfalls using only C#. You can finally unleash all the power of your machine without writing a single line of C++ code.

The Burst Compiler

What if I tell you that it is possible to obtain higher performances by writing C# code instead of C++? You would think I am crazy. However, I am not, and this the goal of the last component of Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS): the Burst compiler.

The Burst compiler is a specialized code-generator that compiles a subset of C# (often called High-Performance C# or HPC#) into machine code that is, most of the time, smaller and faster than the one that is generated by an equivalent C++ code.

The Burst compiler is still in preview, but you can already try it by using the Unity's Package Manager. Of course, you get the most from it when combined with the other two DOTS components.

For more technical info on the Burst compiler, you can refer to Unity’s blog post.

Learn More About Unity Optimization

In this article, we only scratched the surface of Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). If you want to learn more on how to use the DOTS technologies and other optimization techniques for Unity you can read more in my book Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition. This Unity book is your guide to optimizing various aspects of your game development, from game characters and scripts, right through to animations. You will also explore techniques for solving performance issues with your VR projects and learn best practices for project organization to save time through an improved workflow.

Author Bio

Dr. Davide Aversa holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and an MSc in artificial intelligence and robotics from the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy. He has a strong interest in artificial intelligence for the development of interactive virtual agents and procedural content generation. He served as a Program Committee member of video game-related conferences such as the IEEE conference on computational intelligence and games, and he also regularly participates in game-jam contests. He also writes a blog on game design and game development.

You can find him on Twitter, Github, Linkedin.

Unity 2019.2 releases with updated ProBuilder, Shader Graph, 2D Animation, Burst Compiler and more

Japanese Anime studio Khara is switching its primary 3D CG tools to Blender

Following Epic Games, Ubisoft joins Blender Development fund; adopts Blender as its main DCC tool