Simulating an aquatic ecosystem with Entities in Life Below

The developers of Life Below, an underwater coral reef city builder, share how they used Entity Component System (ECS) architecture to simulate thousands of individual aquatic life forms at scale. By adopting a data-oriented approach with ECS, they leveraged Unity's Burst compiler, Job System, and GPU instancing to achieve high-performance simulations of complex ecosystems. Key takeaways include ECS's steep learning curve, the importance of early experimentation, and how it enables adding layers of complexity incrementally without sacrificing performance.