Entity Component System

Overview

ECS is a way of writing code that provides high performance by default.

Under the hood coherence is entirely ECS based but we supply the coherence Toolkit which is Mono-based to make it easier to make massive multiplayer games whatever way you want.

The current version of coherence uses the Unity Entities package. Unity recently announced that they will not support this package in Unity 2021 for a while. This means that the current recommended Unity version for using coherence is Unity 2020 LTS. This is only temporary as we have been working on removing the reliance on Entities internally.

If you would like to use the coherence SDK without the toolkit, we would recommend you take some time to learn about ECS and DOTS (Data Orientated Tech Stack) with Unity.

ECS has three principal parts:

Entities — the entities, or things, that populate your game or program.

Components — the data associated with your entities, but organized by the data itself rather than by entity. (This difference in organization is one of the key differences between an object-oriented and a data-oriented design.)

Systems — the logic that transforms the component data from its current state to its next state— for example, a system might update the positions of all moving entities by their velocity times the time interval since the previous frame.

Here are various materials to learn:

• Unity DOTS Overview - https://unity.com/dots

• Unity ECS Documentation - https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.14/manual/index.html

• Unity Learn, ECS - https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/entity-component-system