So I started playing with Godot in early 2020 and remembered reading an article on ECS and why they don’t do it. I just found it again and they say this pattern has been around in the game industry since the 2010s feels like 1) it’s good Godot doesn’t implement this, just to not deal with any potential Unity BS 2)this patent would fail if you’ve got deep enough pockets and time. Here’s the article: https://godotengine.org/article/why-isnt-godot-ecs-based-gam...
Unity patents ECS
121–130 of 175 posts
Re: Unity patents ECS
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In a sane world, the entire description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things". That archetype stuff is so out of the norm that it took me a long time to grok how to work with it in Unity. It's most certainly not "generic computers doing generic computer things" and I've never seen it elsewhere, so I'd guess it would be quite defensible in court especially now that they…
ECS is bog standard in a lot of smaller game engines. It’s not new, I first worked with it ~2010 while hacking some Flash stuff together, and I use it frequently when I hack together games in other engines. I’m really baffled by how Unity would be able to patent this.
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Re: Unity patents ECS
#123So I started playing with Godot in early 2020 and remembered reading an article on ECS and why they don’t do it. I just found it again and they say this pattern has been around in the game industry since the 2010s feels like 1) it’s good Godot doesn’t implement this, just to not deal with any potential Unity BS 2)this patent would fail if you’ve got deep enough pockets and time. Here’s the article: https://godotengin…
Pretty sure it goes back a lot farther than 2010. As I recall Sean Barrett mentioned using it when working on Theif, which was released in 1998.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#124Patent agent here. At Google we investigated patents and their possible invalidity almost every day. Claim language is obtuse because it's for lawyers, not laymen. An engineer can write the description, but only the lawyer can write the claims. It's immensely complicated, but if Unity does someday assert this patent against someone else, then you all are helping the defendant when they have to defend themselves. At l…
> An engineer can write the description, but only the lawyer can write the claims.
If anyone needs a one-sentence rationale why the entire concept of a software patent should be invalid, here it is.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct, although published is pretty broad it doesn't include everything under the sun. The real problem is that the patent examiners are not in general required to look at the whole breadth of what is published, just what is in the patent databases. As a result there can be clear prior art, but unless it gets fed in during the review process, the practical way to resolve that is likely to end up in court, a…
Interesting side note about non-patent prior art (by the way, the examiners do, most of the time, look for it): I was told that a proposal to require the examiners to use Google was rejected by the union: if you're going to require us to do more work, then you have to pay us more. This was back in 2012 or so. I have no idea if now they have to use Google, but they only get about a day and a half on each patent (again…
> (by the way, the examiners do, most of the time, look for it)
Sure, but usually superficially (and not, I think, required); which is fair - you can't practically require the patent examiners to have the kind of breadth and depth necessary to have a good feel for this.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#126Patent agent here. At Google we investigated patents and their possible invalidity almost every day. Claim language is obtuse because it's for lawyers, not laymen. An engineer can write the description, but only the lawyer can write the claims. It's immensely complicated, but if Unity does someday assert this patent against someone else, then you all are helping the defendant when they have to defend themselves. At l…
> The cost figure I recall is $500,000; maybe it's different now.
That's the standard tactical defence fee? I would guess that kind of money is very far above the means of most open-source developer defendants.
And wouldn't a larger, closed-source business rationally choose to pay Unity (say) $400,000 extortion fee instead of taking it to court with the associated uncertainty?
Re: Unity patents ECS
#127Earlier 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
Ignoring the specific claims in the patent (automatic memory optimization or whatever), if we're just going by entity component system articles, we can do a lot better. Here's one from 2007:
http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are...
IIRC this one was the one to really popularise the idea of not storing any component data in the entities. If you loosen that requirement, there were earlier ones still (eg the one from the Dungeon Siege team).
But as others have mentioned, ECS is really a special case of a relational model, so its entirely possible that Unitity's techniques have been done there already.
Also, I found it pretty difficult to understand the claims, they didn't exactly make it easy to read, so I can't quite figure out exactly what is patented. It also doesn't help that they don't clearly define their terms, eg what exactly do they mean by archetype? Maybe they describe it in the description before the claims, but I didn't find it at a cursory glance and it was too painful to try read it all. I wonder what their definition exactly entails, versus what I imagine they mean from what I know of archetype-based ECS's. For example, if they mean "a conceptual grouping of entities that have the same components" then non-archetype ECS could fit that, but if they mean their specific implementation then I don't know. EnTT, a popular non-archetype-based ECS, has had "views", which are ways to efficiently access components, since its first public commit in 2017: https://github.com/skypjack/entt/commit/b0b8ee7aea3d9f5cfe6f...).
Whether any of that is relevant to the patents validity, I have no idea. Probably not.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#128Patent agent here. At Google we investigated patents and their possible invalidity almost every day. Claim language is obtuse because it's for lawyers, not laymen. An engineer can write the description, but only the lawyer can write the claims. It's immensely complicated, but if Unity does someday assert this patent against someone else, then you all are helping the defendant when they have to defend themselves. At l…
> An engineer can write the description, but only the lawyer can write the claims. If anyone needs a one-sentence rationale why the entire concept of a software patent should be invalid, here it is.
Not just writing them. Apparently only a lawyer should read the claims too:
> Lawyers are not very expensive compared to the consequences of trying to read it yourself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451317)
Re: Unity patents ECS
#129Earlier 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 expect someone to develop an AI-based translation system to convert legalese into layperson's expressions. It could be easier than translating two natural languages.
You might not even need AI if the copied phrases are precise enough (which they’re incentivized to be). Just a regular string search, with annotations and/or a mapping to phrases used by human beings.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In a sane world, the entire description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things". That archetype stuff is so out of the norm that it took me a long time to grok how to work with it in Unity. It's most certainly not "generic computers doing generic computer things" and I've never seen it elsewhere, so I'd guess it would be quite defensible in court especially now that they…
ECS is bog standard in a lot of smaller game engines. It’s not new, I first worked with it ~2010 while hacking some Flash stuff together, and I use it frequently when I hack together games in other engines. I’m really baffled by how Unity would be able to patent this.
Yeah I had never heard of ECS until about a year ago, yet if you could look at the whiteboard on my wall from 2 years ago you'd find a diagram for a primitive version of an ECS I came up with as a hypothetical. Idk understand how tf that could be patentable if its something a former 2.7 gpa CS student could come up with on a whiteboard.