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by shock-value 1745 days ago
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.
2 comments
jhgb 1745 days ago
> 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.

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jeffparsons 1745 days ago
I was wondering when this would come up. Everything people are inventing in the "ECS" space, including the very concept of "ECS" itself is just concepts from databases being adapted to storing small amounts of ephemeral data that needs to be manipulated very quickly in-memory rather than large amounts of data that need to be persisted reliably on disk.

The idea that there's anything patent-worthy in automatically storing like combinations of data with like combinations of data for efficiency is... patently absurd.

But that's where the patent system is, now, I suppose. It's now mostly just a tool to help incumbents raise the barrier to entry so they can fend new entrants off with lawyers rather than merit.

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BirdPlusPlus 1744 days ago
Well said. Incumbents "Industrial Incumbents"

You didn't patent that did you?

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shock-value 1745 days ago
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 these individual sets together with other sets belonging to other groupings. The fact that we are talking about two types of collections (one nested in the other) is key -- that is, the nesting of fields within the sets ("components" in ECS terminology), and the nesting of these sets within the groupings ("entities" in ECS terminology).

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jhgb 1744 days ago
> 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.

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letsInvalid 1745 days ago
That’s not exactly novel either.

I’ve seen engines that do that and updated my own code to do so. Unfortunately git says that was added after they filed.

Their employees could have easily pulled this from community discourse.

What’s probably needed is community backlash; no more unity games. It worked with Apple.

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