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Unity owned ECS patent uses techniques described in 2013 Stack Exchange post (github.com)

submitted 11 months ago by sirdorius to c/gamedev

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The 2013 StackExchange post [^1] describes what is now commonly called an "archetype" based ECS architecture that was implemented as compile time archetypes in the author's open source project in Feb 2018 ^3. A similar ECS model was described later in the June 2018 patent filed by Unity ^2 and active since 2020.

It's useful to bring visibility to the issue for the inevitable patent trolling that will occur in the future.

References: [^1]: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/58693/grouping-entities-of-the-same-component-set-into-linear-memory/

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Software patents are such evil bullshit. As if ECS hadn't been developed 20 years earlier and described in numerous papers and GDC talks after.

[–] sirdorius 9 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I forgot to mention in my original post that ECS was extensively described and already in use by many private commercial engines (like Overwatch) at the time when the patent came out. Absolutely ridiculous patent that shows why the whole system is broken.