About

The project contains different CPU and GPU flocking implementations in Unity's game engine, using a single threaded and multithreaded approach in the CPU, as well as another using compute shaders. All of them are mainly based on Unity's ECS implementation (which was presented by Mike Acton in GDC) and is also included in the project. The original Unity repository that includes the boids implementation using ECS can be found at https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples. All of the art assets are from Unity's demo. See Mike's technical presentation at https://youtu.be/p65Yt20pw0g.

I started this project in 2019 when Unity had already been advertising for about a year their new tech stack: DOTS. I wanted to have an overview on what data-oriented design along with the job system and the burst compiler was able to do in terms of performance, so I decided to compare Unity's implementation against other paradigms, replicating their algorithm as much as I could.

NOTE: As of 22/04/2021 I have upgraded Unity's demo to its latest version, since the project was stuck to Unity 2019.1.14f1 and an older version of the DOTS implementation. I recommend using Unity 2020.3 LTS since future versions may break the project. I believe the core of the algorithm has not changed and most of the new stuff is syntactic sugar and new tools.

Preview

The following gif showcases over 500k boids being simulated in compute shaders with a 980ti at 1080p in a build.