Wait just one second... they managed to actually get a completely generic description of ECS into the claims?
EDIT: yes, yes they did. What you see above is in fact clam 1, in it's entirety.
This is worse than usual. Usually "X patents (common thing)" headlines actually mean "X patents (common thing with weird twist)," which is a great deal less severe. This really looks like Unity got an actual patent on the actual ECS design pattern, the one that every game has used for the past 40 years.
They will be able to extort an awful lot of money with this patent before it gets overturned.
Not really. To me the novelty in the first claim is that they have a system which automatically determines an optimal memory layout, even in the face of new combinations of components within a newly created entity. A typical hand-crafted ECS system wouldn't likely infringe -- it's more likely that the memory layout was defined in advance.
I guess this will be a major roadblock to Unreal Engine offering such an automated ECS system, which is a real shame. There are certain types of games which do need ECS to make viable use of computing resources (simulations, etc). You don't see many of those on Unreal now and I guess you won't for the foreseeable future if this patent holds.
What exactly is their system for determining optimal layout? It must be disclosed in detail. They can't just claim that any approach like that is theirs.
Unfortunately your second sentence is not correct; patents do this overclaiming game all the time.
(not a lawyer, co-inventor on three patents so I've been through this, unfortunately as I didn't want to participate in that system, consult a lawyer before doing anything rash).
The claim matters, not their detailed description. The most harmful patents work that way: describe in detail a specific implementation, but write the claims to cover every alternative implementation you can think of.
Several already existing unreal games already use ecs. I saw a tech talk about Conan exiles for example. It’s just not part of the engine. Can’t find the talk, it was an epic event, but they advertise it in job postings
> they managed to actually get a completely generic description of ECS into the claims?
From looking at the claims, it seems they are patenting archetype-based based ECS. In other words, not just vanilla "array of components" but "array of sets of components".
EDIT: yes, yes they did. What you see above is in fact clam 1, in it's entirety.
This is worse than usual. Usually "X patents (common thing)" headlines actually mean "X patents (common thing with weird twist)," which is a great deal less severe. This really looks like Unity got an actual patent on the actual ECS design pattern, the one that every game has used for the past 40 years.
They will be able to extort an awful lot of money with this patent before it gets overturned.