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A Crash Course in Unity's Entity Component System (Udemy.com)

Create a First Person Shooter which covers Unity's ECS, Parallel Processing and Entity Physics in a Nutshell.

Created by: Penny de Byl

Last updated August 2021

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What you will learn

  • Students will gain an overview of Unity's Entity Component System.
  • Students will learn about the advantages of parallel processing and where to use in their games.

How it compares

Against the other 183 rated Udemy courses in Unity on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.5 out of 5higher than 48% of them
  • Reviews322#95 of 184 by number of reviews
  • Length2 hoursshorter than 90% of them
  • Last updatedAugust 2021more recently than 54% of them

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Course Description

Unity's new Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) and Entity Component System (ECS) programming paradigm have been developed to optimize game development and open up new ways of accessing memory and parallel processing for developing high-performance C# code that takes advantage of contemporary multicore computers. Through the use of the Burst Compiler, your game programs become native code, able to run faster on multiple threads thus pushing the boundaries of the size of your virtual environments and the simultaneous processing of tens of thousands of game objects.

In this free course, Penny zooms through the development of a basic physics-based DOTS First Person Shooter. Using her internationally acclaimed teaching style and knowledge from over 25 years working with games, graphics and having written two award-winning books on games AI, Penny will take you from familiar object-oriented programming and upgrade your skill to the more memory efficient and optimized entity component architecture. Throughout, you will follow along with hands-on workshops designed to show you the potential of Unity's ECS programming through the new DOTS-specific math and physics libraries.

This course requires Unity 2019.3.8. and the Hybrid Renderer Package 0.4.1

Learn how to program and work with:

  • Entities and Components

  • The C# Job Systems

  • Collision Systems

What people are saying about Penny's courses:

  • Dr.Penny is a wonderful person and a true expert. All of her courses I've taken have been top notch and in my opinion there is no better teacher out there.

  • Allow me to say how hugely important this is for a person who is interested in certain type of game design. Creating games where you can create AI behaviours that supports emergent situations.

  • I honestly love Holistic's teaching approach and I've never learned so much within a few hours about coding effectively with such detailed explanations!

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Instructor Details

Penny de Byl

Hi, I'm Dr Penny de Byl.  I'm a full stack developer of most things computer sciency and academic with a true passion for teaching.  I've been teaching others about games development, programming, computer graphics, animation and web design for over 25 years in universities in Australia and Europe at the full professor level. I've also consulted for Unity, SAE, the Australian Institute of Entertainment and Wikitude. My best selling textbooks including Holistic Game Development with Unity are used in over 100 institutions world-wide.  My graduates work at companies like Apple, Ubisoft, LinkedIn and Deloitte Digital.

I have an honours degree in computer graphics and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence for games characters.  Over the course of my career I've won numerous awards for teaching excellence at the state, national and international levels including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's Excellence in Teaching Award and the Unity Mobile Game Curriculum Competition. My approach to teaching computer science and related fields is project-based giving you hands-on workshops you can immediately get your teeth into.

I want you to leave my virtual classroom fully armed with a toolkit of skills for life-long learning.  I'm excited to now be focussing my efforts full-time on Udemy to bring my years of knowledge and experience to those eager to learn about technology.


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Reviews

4.5

322 ratings on Udemy

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By Cédric Lazarecki on 6/16/2022

Useless course if you are using newer version of unity, it's impossible to install the packages without getting many errors. Because of lack of space on my hard drive, i cannot install older versions of unity to do this course :(

By Andrew Tucker on 2/6/2022

Fantastic little Course. Penny really flies through everything you need to create an actual working Shooter example using ECS. Her approach as she states is a sort of hybrid which keeps some of the useful standard C# and Unity basics but they are minor tissue compared to the meat of the main ECS functionality and simple easily duplicatable patterns she layers together. I had looked at ECS before but always essentially gave up because of either broken updates and incompatible packages or just plain indecipherable new syntax and mile long naming conventions. This time I have a set of basic working lightening fast code chunks and I know how they fit together. Looking forward to tPennys full ECS course very soon

By Pierce F. Krouse on 1/3/2022

Another great course from Penny! I took this in January 2022, and the ECS system has changed a lot since the course was developed. I chose to use the latest ECS instead of the versions Penny used, and I *almost* got through the course. Everything worked except the collision code, which is pretty good for a system that is changing fast like ECS is.

By Diego Salinas on 5/18/2021

She is the best Unity instructor at Udemy, her courses never fail at anything, if you have a question she solves them as soon as you can and even if it is something silly or basic, she answers it with great pleasure. I love her and how she teaches about her.

By Jonathan Hirschberg on 1/1/2021

It was a good introduction to ECS and DOTS. She explained well why certain functions and classes were being used. But if you hanen't learned about ECS and DOTS before, you'll sill need more classes after this to really have a good understanding. Nonetheless, it fulfilled its objective, which is to teach people how to do use ECS for a small example.

By Neil McKenna on 11/8/2020

It was a decent mini course with a steep learning curve, though provides a very visual and functional explanation of entities. This a good basis to understand how entities could be used in game development , scientific purposes or even just demonstrations. The instructor is clear and very knowledgeable. An interesting subject

By Gilles Walther on 9/27/2020

It's the second course I take with Penny and it's great. The content is relevant and delivered at the right pace, not too slow and not too fast! The examples are well chosen and the code provided and explained through the course can be reused easily in other project. I'm looking forward to the next lesson.

By Hayden Jocelyn on 8/30/2020

A little short but it was free so I love it!

By Bakinto on 6/1/2020

Penny Debyl has the most valuable and precious contents on unity... I love her way of teaching, skills and the subjects she approach... Hope one day she make a course on procedural animations though .. I believe nobody here has the guts to make such a course except her with all my respects to other others.. Please make it..

By Lawrence Simpson on 5/9/2020

Penny really helped clarify some of the concepts with ECS and DOTS. The course was enjoyable and content clearly explained. I'd enrolled in the more in depth course, but jumped over to this because it looked like a fun foundation and overview. I wasn't disappointed! Thanks for a great course.

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Overall Score : 90 / 100