Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: Unity ECS Patterns

Master Unity ECS (Entity Component System) with DOTS, Jobs, and Burst for high-performance game development. Use when building data-oriented games, optimizing performance, or working with large entity counts.

UncategorizedID: wshobson/agents/unity-ecs-patterns

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wshobson/agents
wshobsonLicense: MIT
32,1353,507

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pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/wshobson/agents/tree/HEAD/plugins/game-development/skills/unity-ecs-patterns

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plugins/game-development/skills/unity-ecs-patterns/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
unity-ecs-patterns
Description
Master Unity ECS (Entity Component System) with DOTS, Jobs, and Burst for high-performance game development. Use when building data-oriented games, optimizing performance, or working with large entity counts.

Unity ECS Patterns

Production patterns for Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) including Entity Component System, Job System, and Burst Compiler.

When to Use This Skill

  • Building high-performance Unity games
  • Managing thousands of entities efficiently
  • Implementing data-oriented game systems
  • Optimizing CPU-bound game logic
  • Converting OOP game code to ECS
  • Using Jobs and Burst for parallelization

Core Concepts

1. ECS vs OOP

| Aspect | Traditional OOP | ECS/DOTS | | ----------- | ----------------- | --------------- | | Data layout | Object-oriented | Data-oriented | | Memory | Scattered | Contiguous | | Processing | Per-object | Batched | | Scaling | Poor with count | Linear scaling | | Best for | Complex behaviors | Mass simulation |

2. DOTS Components

Entity: Lightweight ID (no data)
Component: Pure data (no behavior)
System: Logic that processes components
World: Container for entities
Archetype: Unique combination of components
Chunk: Memory block for same-archetype entities

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

Best Practices

Do's

  • Use ISystem over SystemBase - Better performance
  • Burst compile everything - Massive speedup
  • Batch structural changes - Use ECB
  • Profile with Profiler - Identify bottlenecks
  • Use Aspects - Clean component grouping

Don'ts

  • Don't use managed types - Breaks Burst
  • Don't structural change in jobs - Use ECB
  • Don't over-architect - Start simple
  • Don't ignore chunk utilization - Group similar entities
  • Don't forget disposal - Native collections leak