[btilly]

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 description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things". And therefore by Alice v. CLS Bank as decided by the Supreme Court, it should not be patentable. Period.

Unfortunately the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has gone rogue, and you're almost certainly correct that they will happily grant use of the patent to any patent troll lucky enough to get it. And the Patent Office is so firmly in the land of regulatory capture that bad patents like this have no trouble being issued.

And the result is that people whose work ACTUALLY achieves "Progress of Science and useful Arts" is hampered by this crazy system. And our patent system continues to undermine its stated Constitutional purpose.

[Abishek_Muthian]

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.

[arcanon]

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.

[silexia]

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.

[vmception]

Disagree with gone rogue except for some parts of East Texas

[btilly]

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.

[anothernewdude]

Who cares if all the court cases happen there?

[sombremesa]

> 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 have a patent.

Not sure what you're on about, but if it's a valid concern I'd pick a better example than this specific piece of tech (granted that one tiny snippet from the patent might not portray what the tech is or how it's unique).

Edit: seems like there is some confusion here about ECS and how archetypes are implemented in DOTS. ECS and archetypes are not synonymous, so I’m not sure what to tell you when you claim they are.

But I’m also not sure how downvoting me is helping here. I guess community consensus is that archetypes and ECS are the same thing, in which case Unity will have an uphill battle ahead.

[puddingforears]

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.

[MaulingMonkey]

A lot of us - possibly yourself included - were exposed to ~ECS by this 2007 article: http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy...

Archetypes are a conceptually simple implementation optimization (group similarly-populated objects) not unique to ECSes - e.g. v8 organizes javascript objects based on their "shape" (again, grouping similarly-populated objects, based on their "properties" instead of their "components") (2017 article: https://v8.dev/blog/fast-properties .)

You can add all kinds of automagic parallelizing and filtering libraries (which I imagine have some overlap with database query optimization and scheduling in their fundamentals), but the basics are incredibly trivial - to the point where you might re-invent it by accident without knowing it has a name.

[deertick1]

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.

[skydhash]

I think it’s one of the standard architecture for games. You can do ECS or hierarchical objects any times you need to build a lot of similar objects.

[dkersten]

I thought archetype-based ECS was the standard way to implement an ECS. Typically using bitsets or something to define an archetype.

But I may just not be understanding what an archetype represents exactly. My only real experience with ECS, besides implementing a crude one around 2011 for fun, is EnTT, which specifically advertises itself as not being archetype-based as one of its key differentiators.

Its likely I just don't quite understand archetypes though.