Dear Unity DOTS Readers

Hello, it's been quite some time since the last update. Because there is no comment box in this blog, I'm not sure if there is an audience I'm saying "hello" to right now. This blog was generic Unity blog until I got into Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) when it just came out many years ago with very wacky API compared to now, then it got substantially high amount of DOTS article, that I thought maybe there are now someone out there who remembers this blog as "that khaki DOTS blog" or something along that line.

While I was away, pandemic came and go, Unity had leadership drama, DOTS reached release status, and AI coding assistant has becoming pretty useful, went through 3 generations of cats, all my friends get married and have kids... it had been that long.

Before diving into what I've been up to lately this is the TLDR : I'm coming back to catch up with current version of DOTS. And I'm going to write on this blog as my tool for self learning like I used to do years ago. When I type things along the way I found I could learn faster, then I got to left some digested knowledge for someone else too.

I'm also looking to delete DOTS articles containing deprecated stuff, which I suspect would be over 80% of them. I'm going to make this blog clean and "safe" for future generations of DOTS programmers to not see any unpleasant things that Unity DOTS team (thanks for your hard work...) 'trialed' and found out ther are the 'error'. Any search hit into this blog I want them to be immediately trustable for Entities 1.0+. So I don't want to mention what got replaced by what here because I don't want those search hits. If you used previous Entities version, this page is excellent to learn what's going away and is replaced by what.

This process would take quite a lot of time, maybe I'd rather delete everything with DOTS tag and write all of them from scratch.

For typical readers you can look forward to some new DOTS articles coming out as I re-learn it. Next up is just some '5argon lore' which I guess you could read to waste some time.

More about myself along those missing years

Learning DOTS while API rapidly fluctuating and keep destroying my project was tiring but I did not get tired of DOTS and quit, which some readers might assumed. I'm entertained by its absurd technicality and what it wanted to achieve by doing so at all costs. No matter what Unity as a company and management went through, I always wanted DOTS skillset in my tool belt.

When it was early pandemic I simply got a full stack web dev job in financial business (generally pays well, especially compared to 'free' DOTS research + personal little passion game I was doing) and job is extremely hard to find at that time so it is stupid to let that go and say you can't buy me out of passion with money. It is also a remote job with minimal on-site requirement, and I get to learn TypeScript, React, Go, Next.. the typical meta workhorse set to make a webapp and make money.

In fact you can if it is enough money (haha) and in no time I was able to go wander in Villa Market, a place full of imported goods, and was able to buy some mid shelf alcohol  like Campari and Beefeater without heavily pondering about my life savings. I was able to iterate on my baking and cooking repeatedly wasting ingredients on failures after failures without worry. I could always grab any bakery and souvenirs I passed by without any thought and most noticed that somehow I looked like a much nicer person than when I was working on my game. And I was able to purchased a robot vacuum and pressure washer for my parent's house.

I could as well use money to get more productive and therefore earning more money with them in a loop, such as able to upgrade my 2015 Macbook all the way to M2, paid subscription to Copilot, or just able to order good coffee when I work at cafe at day time. It's not so different from gameplay loop in games such as Monster Hunter or Cookie Clicker where you could climb up to harder targets and farm more valuable resources. It sounded obvious, but this approach is impossible when I was working on my games and DOTS research out of passion, you know? I just can't afford to upgrade my tool of trades along the way. Getting this job is quite literally life-changing, though it limits things I could do with my upgrades, which is to work more on this job.

Along the way I'm farming money, my game surely stagnates and even got removed from Google Play Store because I forgot to check mail and press some comply button. I'm always looking to eventually request to reduce work and come back to DOTS, Unity, my Asset Store assets, and my game. Coming back from exchanging money for stuff, to making stuff I could call my own. But unfortunately in early phase of that product I can't really stop. I thought it'd be like 1 or 2 years before it gets less busy, but turns out it took 3~4 years.

This year and this month is finally that time I'm looking for. So here I am. Thanks for reading. Cheers!

Ps. Thanks to this remote job I was able to move back from capital to a more comfy hometown with my parents there. Completely unrelated to this blog but I also got into a new Arkham Horror LCG hobby and was able to connect with my highschool friends to form a regular play group. Since I already like this game, I started a static info site http://arkham-starter.com/ project, a very good excuse to learn Svelte, and as some stress relief from actual work. I'm looking forward to apply this Svelte knowledge to remake my game's homepage when I get to that point.