[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.