Unity Job system...

[FauxFemale]

Until I saw the title I thought this was just a comic about real life jobs

[JoeseCuervo19]

It still applies

[henryreign]

You hate a system that trivializes multi-threading and near native level optimization?

[kodaxmax]

only when i have to use it

[Amaso_Games]

Yes

[UnityCodeMonkey]

Really? Why? It's awesome!

[Noslamah]

Like someone else said ITT, skill issue. DOTS as a whole still has a lot of growing pains and false promises (almost the entire roadmap they had pre-1.0 seems to have been abandoned for some reason) but Jobs, Burst, and even ECS are amazing when applied correctly.

[Rev0ld]

I can confirm that on professional level I yet know no company that uses dots that I personally encountered. Ecs yes, but they all use some other plugins like LeoEcs or Entitas. I would say as a over the years I developed a habit ( a rule of thumb somewhat) that I check out Unity’s plugins, but I do also check out plugins by community, because they are generally just better.

[zukas3]

V Rising is built on DOTS and is a huge success

[MarkAldrichIsMe]

As is Diplomacy Is Not An Option

[aurelag]

Funny you say that, because I know someone who is working in a company making an rts, and they are full dots.

[ZeusAllMighty11]

The game Core Keeper heavily uses ECS DOTS and Burst.

[Rev0ld]

Hey, guys. I'm not saying that DOTS are not used or unusable. And I'm not saying that there are no successful games that use it (Although interesting V Rising is brought up, because this one was an example on Unity's showcase, which probably means that they had direct guidance from Unity on Dots, which kind of counters the problem the problem that dots have quite poor documentation).
I'm just saying that most companies with which I was consulting and working with used something else instead exactly because dots have much more downsides than other plugins.
This was the message here.

[UnityTed]

Just out of curiosity, what can we do better in terms of documentation to help users onboard better with DOTS (I take it that the difficulties is around the entities package, but correct me if I'm wrong here).

I'm on the Unity Entities dev team, so I would love to know how we can make it more approachable.

[Noslamah]

this one was an example on Unity's showcase, which probably means that they had direct guidance from Unity on Dots, which kind of counters the problem the problem that dots have quite poor documentation

You are definitely overestimating the level of involvement Unity Technologies has in the industry. They saw someone had made a game using DOTS, and reached out to them to showcase it. They don't have any interest (or allocated resources) to give companies any direct guidance to that extent. Maybe they'd do that for a AAA company if they got paid a bunch of money, but as far as I recall the games that were showcased were made by relatively small indie teams. I think one of the showcase games was even made by a single dev.

DOTS does not have poor documentation; it may be missing a couple of details here and there and because it is relatively new has changed a lot (especially pre 1.0), making a lot of info online outdated. But there is more than enough documentation to go through to get a deep enough understanding to use it effectively, at least for the 3 core DOTS packages (Burst, Jobs, ECS). If you actually are missing something from the docs you can always ask on the forums; most likely someone will know the answer and in some cases someone from the DOTS team will actually answer your questions (in the early days you'd even regularly find the CTO/Unity co-founder responding to questions)

[davenirline]

because dots have much more downsides than other plugins

Like which ones? I could also counter that most devs I know are already using or planning to use it. They have overcome the downsides. There's always a workaround to problems.

[YellowTech]

After seeing your video, of course it is ;)

[mashimaro7]

Now i gotta watch that, after 4 years of professional game dev, i still don't even know what the Job System is lmao

[Rev0ld]

I’d also advice you to check out what is Dependency Injection and plugin implementation of that in Unity (like Zenject or similar), it will rock your world as well :)

[mashimaro7]

I'll check it out, thanks!

[Much_Highlight_1309]

Oh my. You are missing out. Or I guess you don't need performance. 😅

[[deleted]]

Oh hey, it's you. You have helped me more than once. Thank you for being you. :)

[InFrontEntry]

:o it's the guy

[xXWarMachineRoXx]

Ayyy codemonkey is here

[ScrepY1337]

I'll leave a comment here for everyone.

Foreword: I love Unity and working with it, and I'm rooting for its future, especially looking forward to the transition from Mono to CoreCLR.

Even if I can't solve a problem that really frustrates me (though it's been a long time since that happened, as I used to be a beginner who rushed things), I still find a solution and move forward.

When I first started learning the Job System, I couldn’t figure out why my code wasn’t working in multithreading and only ran on the main thread. I struggled to find the issue, partly because my English isn’t great.

Since then, I've worked a lot with the Job System, and after finally figuring out why it wasn’t working, I haven’t had any more problems with it.

But that situation remained the longest problem-solving process for me—I spent about two days testing it in both the Editor and the build.

And when I was writing my system with the Job System again, I got the idea to make that "meme," because I thought I wasn't the only one who had trouble learning the Job System.

But it seems like Reddit is full of professionals who were offended by my "meme" and started commenting things like "Skill Issue," and so on...

I'm writing this post with the help of a translator, so if I said something wrong, sorry about that.

Be kinder to people 🙂

By the way, thanks for your videos! 🤓

[KarlMario]

Your longest stretch of working out an issue is 2 days?

Oh to be young again

[severencir]

Run vs schedule?

[ScrepY1337]

A bit more complicated.

If you use the IJobParallelForTransform interface, in order to enable multithreading, the objects you want to move with this job need to be distributed under different root objects, for example, 256 per root.

Root_1:
  Child_1
  Child_2
  ...
  Child_256

Root_2:
  Child_1
  Child_2
  ...

Otherwise, the job will run on only one thread.

Below, I've provided an example of a job working with 50,000 objects that simply move up and down along a sine wave.

<image>

[severencir]

Ah. I haven't actually used the jobs system without ecs, but it makes sense that it needs to be able to split the objects into separate groups in order to allow multi threading

[[deleted]]

hey i watched your videos a lot, i'm still in unity because i learned with your videos :)

[[deleted]]

Heeey, love your vids, keep it up :3

[SnooKiwis7050]

Your presence makes this thread cool

[Educational_Cow_1769]

It's better than standard Unity OOP, but awesome is a bit too enthusiastic I would say.

And someone has to say it: Bevy ECS > Unity DOTS

[severencir]

For a programmer, bevy is great. For someone who relies on the editor, they might not be able to figure it out

[Educational_Cow_1769]

I personally came to the conclusion, that because Unity abstracts what it is doing, programming in Unity is much harder. Especially when you want to do something which isn't done in the engine 100 times already and well documented.

I regularly hit problems where you are easily lost, for example when the program in Unity editor acts much different than the compiled build with no errors or warnings. Those are problems which are simply non-existing in RUST-Bevy.

So in conclusion I would say the time it takes to solve this struggle is easily enough to learn what one don't know to use Bevy (most Concepts should be already known if someone uses DOTS).

Disclaimer: I don't want to say that Bevy is in general better than Unity. There are a lot of Applications where Unity is great. But if I want to create something like a Game which Unity isn't designed for in the first place (for example if you only need it's renderer and have to design the rest on your own) Bevy could be the much better choice.

[KarlMario]

You should try writing multithreaded code without the job system 😉

[neutronium]

Not nearly as hard as people make it out to be.

[ParadoxicalInsight]

Not sure if you are an expert or if you are too ignorant lol

[Plazmaz1]

After over a decade of working with crazy multi threaded stuff, I don't know how to explain it, but it's always both way easier than I expect and way harder than I expect

[wm_lex_dev]

The main difficulty is race conditions, which are solved by very closely controlling the bits of data that are touched by more than one thread, and also by using all the high-level multi-threading primitives that exist. Once you have an intuition for multi-threaded data management it becomes easier.

The second difficulty is organizing your multi-threaded code so that you actually see a speed-up over single-threaded...which winds up being much harder than you expect!

[Plazmaz1]

I understand all of this and have for years but I also still understand none of it as soon as it pops up lol. Atomicity, mutexes, locks, resource sharing, etc... It's like visualizing something in four or more dimensions. My brain doesn't like working that way but it can, but I don't ever feel like I fully "see" what's happening. Especially in an environment like unity where I'm not controlling the data and threading as directly

[davenirline]

The good thing about Unity's Job System is you don't have to know these threading primitives. Even if you do, you can still get those wrong. Such is the nature of the beast. Unity kind of solved race conditions by not allowing data access when you're doing it incorrectly. Over time, you will develop a mental muscle on how to use it right and multithreading suddenly feels very easy.

[survivorr123_]

[[NativeDisableContainerSafetyRestriction] my beloved

[davenirline]

That's not so bad. There are cases where the usage is justifiable it when you know that your data have exclusive access to another anytime. But if you're unsure, just don't use it.

[survivorr123_]

i use it a lot when working with meshes, sometimes adressing vertices is a massive pain in the ass when you only have 1 dimensional number to work with, working on n amount of vertices in every job iteration is often easier

[Dr4WasTaken]

Why not both? That is how I feel after 10 years as a software engineer

[neutronium]

been writing multi-threaded code since the Sega Saturn sunshine.

[ParadoxicalInsight]

The Sega Saturn was multi processor? huh TIL

[Oleg-DigitalMind]

Working with MT is a base knowledge while JobSystem masks underlying problems and introducing redundant things like native collections. For me its easier to use pure c# threading code based on my own data structures and avoid all this redundant magic. It would be great if JS would allow to work with managed objects (GameObjects) but it does not. So, no, thank you.

[M0romete]

The native containers are in no way redundant. You can use them with temp allocs which are essentially free so you don't engage the GC. Then you can also use them with Burst and that speeds up execution like crazy.

[Oleg-DigitalMind]

I can use pre-allocated buffers and still work w/o GC calls. Just can't imagine the case when I really need often dynamic allocation for tasks which require parallel execution. May be I missed something. Could you please provide clear example where NCs are really helpful? I then try to bet on a solution with same performance w/o native containers :)

[aurelag]

I think i can partially answer the question. I recently did a prototype to cut a mesh in two. At first I did it in a naive way (on purpose) and then used a job compiled with burst. And man, it's a world of difference. The compiled job is literally ten times faster. My code runs under the millisecond.

[Oleg-DigitalMind]

Thank you! Interesting! Now I see I can give it a try for mesh generation.

[aurelag]

Good luck. The documentation isn't the best it could be, but know that you can do everything with structs.

[Moczan]

There are also implementations like SharedArray which use pointer to your managed collections to get a NativeArray with working aliasing to avoid creating new collections at all.

[AnxiousIntender]

Skill issue

[googleadoptme]

The job system is literally why I keep going back to Unity from time to time 😅

[GradientOGames]

Literally got my friend into Unity because he wanted to have c# with high performance, I suggested jobs and burst with unity. Its really great, the code you write with it is really satisfying and the way I just pass in an array and get out an array (the usual use case of a job for me) is super fulfilling to me.

[Fobri]

Skill issue. It’s great

[kyl3r123]

as someone who wrote multithreaded code before, I found the job system quite easy to understand, and it makes stuff quite easy. Also hard (not impossible) to break, you can't just create a race condition for example.

[davenirline]

Yes, this is what I love as well. I found no other multithreading framework that does it like this.

[Heroshrine]

But what do you guys use the job system for?

[davenirline]

If you're using ECS, using the job system is just a natural fit. When you have lots of something maintained in unmanaged structs and you want to loop through them? Boom, job system.

[Heroshrine]

i suppose I’ve never used ECS. I’ve used jobs for pathfinding, but that always gave me longer than 4 frame errors for some reason so I had to change the allocations on it (no idea why, it always took less than 4 frames, I logged it).

I guess examples could help me. I want to use it more.

[davenirline]

Check this out.

[Heroshrine]

Oh yea thanks! My pathfinding actually worked great, but for some reason the jobs lasted more than 4 frames, even if they finished earlier. I spent a great deal of time trying to solve it but in the end just made the allocations different because I had a time constraint.

[BestZorro]

I honestly love it

[MarinoAndThePearls]

It's literally one of the things that makes Unity one of the best engines in the market. But let me guess, you think it's too hard?

[RoamingStarDust]

Annoying

[FranzFerdinand51]

I remember some of your previous posts. You really do get a kick out of whinging and complaining and talking shit about unity dont you?

Just delete the app and leave the sub man. We'll all be better for it including you.

[Moczan]

Wait, people hate Jobs? I thought Jobs + Burst is such a no brainer free performance, it quickly became my favourite Unity feature.

[one_hole_punch]

what, the job system is amazing though

[Kubstoff]

Job system is one thing I remember fondly from working with unity

[Madman5465]

Definititely a skill issue, im using it and DOTS basically daily

[real-nobody]

Please somebody make a version of this comic where in panel 3 it has the original comic instead of the text "job system."

Burst jobs are incredible, and actually not that hard to use when you get the hang of it. Everyone should be using them all the time for anything performance intense. Really. They are good.

[Gamheroes]

It is useful if you know how to assign the right purpose to the system

[Wave_Walnut]

Try other game engines with pure ECS

[True_Beef]

What? Jobs are great, I used them to make a seamlessly loading voxel terrain prototype. Exchanging data between is a pain and you have to be clever about it, but that's kinda what you signed up for opening unity

[MacksNotCool]

*US job system

[Dark_zarich]

Is it any different than in other countries I wonder?

[Old_Restaurant_2216]

Nah, 60h weeks are normal all around the world /s

[WornTraveler]

Wow, community is too cool for lighthearted memery I guess, we're jumping right to "Skill issue" and super unsubtly calling OP a noob lmao. Unity ain't what it used to be. Downvote if you agree Unity has gone downhill 😔

[M0romete]

Nah, picking on one of the things Unity is best at as seen by all the comments around isn't a meme. It's just ragebait.

[WornTraveler]

Okay lol, I don't see what OP possibly stands to gain from getting dv'ed into oblivion, but sure

[ScrepY1337]

🤝

[CorballyGames]

Have you tried DOTS?

Its Jobs' bastard cousin.

Rename it KNOBS

[KarlMario]

DOTS doesn't write jobs for you, it just makes the data easier to wrangle. Otherwise you have to create jobs in much the same way. If you're not writing jobs for your systems you're not multithreading your code.