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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#61

Post by Rd6n6 »

shock-value wrote: post #44
jjoonathan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait just one second... they managed to actually get a completely generic description of ECS into the claims? EDIT: yes, yes they did. What you see above is in fact clam 1, in it's entirety. This is worse than usual. Usually "X patents (common thing)" headlines actually mean "X patents (common thing with weird twist)," which is a great deal less severe. This really looks like Unity got an actual patent on the actual…

Not really. To me the novelty in the first claim is that they have a system which automatically determines an optimal memory layout, even in the face of new combinations of components within a newly created entity. A typical hand-crafted ECS system wouldn't likely infringe -- it's more likely that the memory layout was defined in advance. I guess this will be a major roadblock to Unreal Engine offering such an automa…

Several already existing unreal games already use ecs. I saw a tech talk about Conan exiles for example. It’s just not part of the engine. Can’t find the talk, it was an epic event, but they advertise it in job postings

https://jobs.funcom.com/jobs/975839-gameplay-programmer

Edit: the video https://youtu.be/QlKXPBFh5BM

Re: Unity patents ECS

#62

Post by jandrese »

shock-value wrote: post #44
jjoonathan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait just one second... they managed to actually get a completely generic description of ECS into the claims? EDIT: yes, yes they did. What you see above is in fact clam 1, in it's entirety. This is worse than usual. Usually "X patents (common thing)" headlines actually mean "X patents (common thing with weird twist)," which is a great deal less severe. This really looks like Unity got an actual patent on the actual…

Not really. To me the novelty in the first claim is that they have a system which automatically determines an optimal memory layout, even in the face of new combinations of components within a newly created entity. A typical hand-crafted ECS system wouldn't likely infringe -- it's more likely that the memory layout was defined in advance. I guess this will be a major roadblock to Unreal Engine offering such an automa…

Unless the system was attempting to cache-optimize the memory, then it is probably going to infringe. So basically everybody.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#63

Post by lamontcg »

jcranmer wrote: post #34
nextaccountic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's aggravating that parents are purposefully written in a language that makes it harder to read. What I could gather from it is that this is just an implementation of archetype-based ECS. Which just means that entities with the same set of components (that is, the same "archetype") are allocated together. But I don't know whether they are patenting archetypes in general or just a narrow usage. Now I have a question…

> Now I have a question: is it possible that things published before the date of the patent (24 march 2020) are infringing on the patent? Or, on the contrary, things published before this date can actually be prior art? You have to look at the date of filing, not date of publication. The date of filing is June 12, 2018 (patents take a few years to issue these days). So March 9, 2019 cannot be prior art.

If someone online talked about archetypes earlier than June 12, 2018 that can be prior art.

You don't need to have working code to take on a patent. If someone posted a medium article, or even some kind of proof of concept or cobbled together POC that'd be enough.

(I think really any kind of proof that you had the idea before that date is good enough -- a personal diary would work in principle, but you'd need to somehow prove that you wrote your thoughts down on the date and didn't forge it after the fact)

Re: Unity patents ECS

#65

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #41

Setting aside whether or not this patent is silly or abstract or obvious or anything else, I have one important question: what does Unity plan to do with this? Most big tech companies have a constant stream of patent applications, many of which are granted. But they rarely sue over 99% of them. Sure, Amazon had one-click for however many years and they cared about it. But the other tens of thousands of patents Amazon…

[deleted]

Re: Unity patents ECS

#66

Post by gentleman11 »

mabbo wrote: post #41

Setting aside whether or not this patent is silly or abstract or obvious or anything else, I have one important question: what does Unity plan to do with this? Most big tech companies have a constant stream of patent applications, many of which are granted. But they rarely sue over 99% of them. Sure, Amazon had one-click for however many years and they cared about it. But the other tens of thousands of patents Amazon…

Last year unity retroactively changed the license on assets from its asset store. Since then, you can no longer let freelancers or contractors use your assets while they do work for you, you end up having to buy them each a copy of everything in practice unless their work is really decoupled from the project.

It’s a real killer for indies who are trying to collaborate who have not formed a company yet. This seems to apply to items you purchased before they changed the terms. They even promised they freelancers could use your assets in support forums days before the change

I stopped using unity after that. They don’t act in good faith towards their users

Re: Unity patents ECS

#67

Post by bcrosby95 »

cosmotic wrote: post #29
hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

As a patent lawyer, can you explain what that claim means? Why does it seem intentionally confusing?

> Why does it seem intentionally confusing?

Because "group entities together in memory by which components they have" isn't patent worthy.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#68

Post by [deleted] »

jcranmer wrote: post #34
nextaccountic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's aggravating that parents are purposefully written in a language that makes it harder to read. What I could gather from it is that this is just an implementation of archetype-based ECS. Which just means that entities with the same set of components (that is, the same "archetype") are allocated together. But I don't know whether they are patenting archetypes in general or just a narrow usage. Now I have a question…

> Now I have a question: is it possible that things published before the date of the patent (24 march 2020) are infringing on the patent? Or, on the contrary, things published before this date can actually be prior art? You have to look at the date of filing, not date of publication. The date of filing is June 12, 2018 (patents take a few years to issue these days). So March 9, 2019 cannot be prior art.

[deleted]

Re: Unity patents ECS

#69

Post by jay_kyburz »

timmytokyo wrote: post #55

Ironically, Unity's ECS development effort has gone radio-silent in the last few months. Their latest versions of the Unity Editor (2021.1+) are no longer compatible with ECS, and Unity's forum reps have not responded to the many game devs left in limbo and begging for info or an update. Something with ECS development is clearly going haywire, and the silence from the Unity people is troubling.

Because its such a different way of working I had assumed they would fork the engine and start pitching a different kind of engine with big changes to the work flow and editor. Call it Super Unity and charge twice as much.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#70

Post by shock-value »

coldcode wrote: post #59
shock-value wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My read (and from what I know of ECS) is that it's basically claiming a system which automatically organizes the memory layouts of instances of different types of "entities" (i.e. "type" meaning which "components" it includes) in an efficient manner. Here, an "entity" is just an object identifier (integer, or whatever). A "component" is a specific set of data relevant to some function (e.g. position component would h…

It's basically describing using a slab allocator to arrange the entities. How is this new art?

I don't know the details of slab allocators. Though if you are describing an allocator that does not have knowledge of what the memory is being used for (e.g. the difference between asking the allocator for memory for a position component defined as three floats and also a color component also coincidentally defined as three floats, versus asking the allocator for two sets of three floats without regard to their intended usage), then it is not the same.
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