This is game over for indie devs :|
Unity patents ECS
71–80 of 175 posts
Re: Unity patents ECS
#72Ironically, 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.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is what they end up doing. Trying to shoehorn ECS into an already existing object-oriented engine has probably been an engineering nightmare for them.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#73I wonder if this patent will be recognized or enforceable in Europe.
The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable, so no.
That doesn't stop them, Benoît Battistelli has been actively pushing for software patents and ignored the EPC.
With staff being quoted previously: “We are far too often put in front of the dilemma of either working according to the European Patent Convention and respecting the examiner’s guidelines, or issuing ‘products’ as our hierarchy demands"
The wikipedia article on him is harrowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoît_Battistelli#Discontent_...
Re: Unity patents ECS
#74Earlier 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.
Aren't ECS systems much older?
I remember reading about them in my CS studies, and that was pre 2011.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about Archetype specifically, but discussions on twitter about this have pointed out talks from GDC going back to at least 2002 when it comes to ECS.
Yes, but their claim is specifically about (quoting my other comment): > It appears to describe a data-oriented component entity system in which all data types within a component are assigned to chunks (batches) in such a way that they can be optimally grouped with data from components of other entities for optimal memory access. This is not new either. I and others have done this for years. The term "archetype" is s…
Without commenting on whether this patent should be granted or not, I really don't think it is about ECS in general. The patent has to do with an automated system for organizing component data into arrays and chunks. The key word being "automated". You give it definitions for component data, start creating entities with combinations of those components, and it does all the rest (at runtime).
There might very well be prior art for that as well but any ECS system where the layout scheme has been defined in advance would not be relevant one way or the other. At least that is my read of all of this.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the patent actually covers is governed by the claims at the very end of the patent, and most of the rest of the document is generally irrelevant, per my very limited understanding of how patents work. That said, I've reread claim 1 a couple of times and I have no clue what it is actually claiming.
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…
Splitting up objects attributes into separate arrays is required if you plan to work with those data on the GPU. I did it when working with Java and OpenCL, and wanted to efficiently access the same data trough Java objects and also in OpenCL kernels. OpenCL does not know about objects, like Java, but it can access data in arrays, so practically every Java object holds an index into the arrays of the different attributes.
Per my knowledge Unity ECS does not currently process data on the GPU, but uses ECS to split work to multiple threads on the CPU. If the threads work on data that only they need to touch, then there is no need to synchronise them. It is also more cache efficient to read and write data from a couple of arrays sequentially, than to pull objects and their attributes from all over the heap.
The idea of storing objects by attributes, instead of object instances is not new. Some clever allocator indeed might be new.
I suspect they want to make it harder for Unreal to make the same system. Unreal might have nice visuals, but scaling was not their strength before.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#77Patent 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…
> And on unpatentable subject matter (i.e., being an abstract idea), there is a pretty good argument that this improves the functionality of the computer, not just uses a computer to do something known That's not really what is getting folks riled up with respect to patentability. The techniques mentioned (as interpreted by some) are considered not at all novel, being widely known in the prior art. That's my take. I…
>> Even with all that added specificity, I still think it falls short of clearing the bar of novelty beyond prior art. This is such a performance-relevant part of game engines that leverage ECS, that somebody out there has to have already thought of ways to improve the memory management of entities.
I think it's more specific than a combination of ECS and memory allocation strategy. Since ECS allows dynamic building of "types" or "classes" of objects, this seems to be automatically detecting new types and allocating memory for them separately. Maybe? So go ahead and ECS all you want, and go ahead and use spiffy memory management all you want, but don't tie type inference into your memory allocator. IANAL but that seems to be the ostensibly unique part.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#78Earlier 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
It's not relevant. Unity is claiming an automated system for determining an optimal memory layout as entities with new combinations of components are generated (at runtime). Such a layout defined in advance would not infringe.
Re: Unity patents ECS
#79Earlier 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.
Aren't ECS systems much older? I remember reading about them in my CS studies, and that was pre 2011.
It's specifically archetype based ECS that's been patented. Like (seemingly) everyone else in gamedev, I've implemented ECS multiple times over the past 10 years. The last time I did it was in Rust, trying to be the first to use Rust's awesome parallel processing constructs to make an automatically parallel ECS, I got distracted halfway through and then specs beat me to it.
I'd never seen or heard of archetype based ECS before I first saw Legion and I was very impressed with it. I don't know where they got the idea but it's very worrying if Unity legit came up with this first. I'm not super up to date on what's happening inside AAA studios, but what I've seen in production is that game studios usually manually group components to optimise performance. The automatic grouping in archetypes is definitely not mentioned in any tutorial or game engine architecture I've ever seen before Legion.
Edit: creator of bevy has a great initial reaction to this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/pjtpkj/comment/hbzaz6...
Re: Unity patents ECS
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Except that it might be, because if people knew how to do it, they would have for the past 20 years that ECS have been implemented in the games industry that is notoriously focused on memory locality optimisation.
(not that I'm advocating for the patentability of software in general, I just think that if software should be patentable, this sure seems like something that could be)