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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#151

Post by anothernewdude »

vmception wrote: post #141
btilly wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

Disagree with gone rogue except for some parts of East Texas

Who cares if all the court cases happen there?

Re: Unity patents ECS

#153

Post by arcanon »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #149
btilly wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

It's unfortunate that any criticism of the patent ecosystem gets immediately shot down by 'You are not a lawyer', The impact of the flawed patent system affects everyone and so anyone can point it out. I strongly believe that actual innovators are now left to 'innovate' within the boundaries set by the mega corporations with the help of their patent-pipeline and the patent trolls with the help of flawed legal systems…

To be fair the lawyers are mad at us engineers for automating away many of their jobs. I think they’re jealous their profession isn’t top tier anymore.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#154

Post by ratww »

adanto6840 wrote: post #131
CreepGin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine them to just continue DOTS like normal after going silent for so long. If they don't axe it, then they may choose to do something drastically different than before, like automatic ECS conversion under the hood. ECS is really good for things that scale. Architecturally, it has both pros and cons to OOP. After working with ECS for a few years, I came to the conclusion that OOP is still the best for beha…

I never understood why they didn't take this approach -- converting under-the-hood "automatically" to their ECS paradigm. The existing data-structures were/are already very similar to their ECS counterparts (though with substantially less boilerplate code); the main "issue" in trying to do an 'automatic conversion', at least that I could foresee, was related to references & non-blittable types. Even then, it seems li…

> I never understood why they didn't take this approach -- converting under-the-hood "automatically" to their ECS paradigm

I completely agree. I've done compile-time code transformation/generation in C# using Reflection in the past, and while it's not really trivial, it's entirely feasible. I knew some people who did this independently because of things like INotifyPropertyChanged in WPF. They're already doing things that are way more advanced than that with the usage of the [BurstCompile] attribute.

If anything, they could just restrict the usage of fields that don't work with it.

> At this point there's so, so, so much of the Unity ecosystem that just flat out fails to work beyond some very, very, very small scale that it's just mind-blowing.

Someone in here said that everything in Unity is either unmaintained or unfinished. I share this sentiment. :(

Re: Unity patents ECS

#155

Post by ratww »

robertlagrant wrote: post #148
BudaDude wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem with Godot is the 3D engine is nowhere near as good as Unity or Unreal . Godot 4 is a lot closer but given Godot’s history , it will take years to arrive . With all of this said , I am rooting for Godot . Long term , an open source game engine will be better .

Is Lumberyard decent as an open source 3D engine? Or did they tie it to AWS in some way?

It's more open now, it was renamed to "Open 3D Engine", and it's maintained by a separate foundation.

Don't know how decent it is. It is definitely full of features and has what seems to be a good editor.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#156

Post by jhgb »

shock-value wrote: post #140
jhgb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unity is claiming an automated system for determining an optimal memory layout as entities with new combinations of components are generated So they've patented a database server, basically.

Can you name a database that performs such a function? There might very well be one, but I'm not aware. I'm most familiar with relational databases and the way in which their data is stored is generally dictated by the schema. At a minimum, to be consistent with this patent we'd be talking about a database that accepts arbitrary groupings of predefined sets of fields, which then on-the-fly determines how best to pack…

> I'm most familiar with relational databases and the way in which their data is stored is generally dictated by the schema.

One of the major features of relational databases (and the improvement over their predecessors) was precisely the disconnect between logical and physical model. If the logical schema dictates how something is stored physically, then it's not a terribly good system. At the very least the intention with relational databases was to provide for this extra flexibility that previous models didn't have. Sure you don't have to exercise that flexibility but it's always been there.

> we'd be talking about a database that accepts arbitrary groupings of predefined sets of fields, which then on-the-fly determines how best to pack these individual sets together with other sets belonging to other groupings

So basically columnar storage with table inheritance would be enough to do the trick. I know there's databases for either of those features, and it's absolutely not a huge leap to put the two together. Fact is I wanted to implement something like this for CLOS but didn't have the time yet, sadly.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#157

Post by adampk »

letsInvalid wrote: post #51
jcranmer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ok, 2019 is out How about 2013: https://www.gamedev.net/tutorials/programming/general-and-ga... I use a heavily updated version of this for my own projects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3aieHjyNvw&t=1455s

"In this 2017 GDC session, Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains how Overwatch uses the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture to create a rich variety of layered gameplay."

(My favorite resource to explain ECS + NetCode)

Re: Unity patents ECS

#158

Post by skohan »

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.

The tinfoil hat interpretation would be that this is Unity's Embrace/Extend/Extinguish. First hire Mike Acton to build an ECS feature for Unity. patent it, and ensure that neither him nor anybody else can use this design pattern to beat their engine.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#159

Post by silexia »

arcanon wrote: post #153
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that any criticism of the patent ecosystem gets immediately shot down by 'You are not a lawyer', The impact of the flawed patent system affects everyone and so anyone can point it out. I strongly believe that actual innovators are now left to 'innovate' within the boundaries set by the mega corporations with the help of their patent-pipeline and the patent trolls with the help of flawed legal systems…

To be fair the lawyers are mad at us engineers for automating away many of their jobs. I think they’re jealous their profession isn’t top tier anymore.

The entire patent system needs to be dismantled. It's simply hampers competition and prevents free trade. All of us in the technology industry know that the simple facts are that building a business is 99% perspiration and 1% innovation. Further, any new idea is based on a mountain of previous human innovations. Even the largest leap in human history was a miniscule percentage of the entire knowledge base it rested on. For someone to claim ownership over even a small bit of something that is based on all the sweat blood and tears in human history is nightmarishly wrong.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#160

Post by btilly »

vmception wrote: post #141
btilly wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

Disagree with gone rogue except for some parts of East Texas

I was not naming courts in general. I was naming the specific appeals court that takes on all patent cases, and has essentially constructed most of current patent law unsupervised.

See https://www.obwbip.com/newsletter/why-does-the-u-s-supreme-c... for some background on this.

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