World

A World organizes entities into isolated groups. A world owns both an EntityManager and a set of Systems. Entities created in one world only have meaning in that world, but can be transferred to other worlds (with EntityManager.MoveEntitiesFrom). Systems can only access entities in the same world. You can create as many worlds as you like.

By default Unity creates a default World when your application starts up or you enter Play mode. Unity instantiates all systems (classes that extend ComponentSystemBase) and adds them to this default world. Unity also creates specialized worlds in the Editor. For example, it creates an Editor world for entities and systems that run only in the Editor, not in playmode and also creates conversion worlds for managing the conversion of GameObjects to entities. See WorldFlags for examples of different types of worlds that can be created.

Use World.DefaultGameObjectInjectionWorld to access the default world.

Managing systems

The World object provides methods for creating, accessing and removing systems from the world.

In most cases, you can use GetOrCreateSystem to get an instance of a system (creating an instance if one doesn't already exist).

Time

The value of the Time property of systems is controlled by the World a system is in. By default, Unity creates a TimeData entity for each world, which is updated by a UpdateWorldTimeSystem instance to reflect the elapsed time since the previous frame. A system's Time property is an alias for the current world time.

The FixedStepSimulationSystemGroup treats time differently than other system groups. Instead of updating once at the current delta time, systems in the fixed step simulation group update at a fixed interval and might update more than once per frame if the fixed interval is a small enough fraction of the frame time.

If you need finer control of time in a World, you can specify a time value directly with World.SetTime. You can also PushTime to temporarily change the world time and then PopTime to return to the previous time (in a time stack).

Custom initialization

To initialize your application manually at startup, implement the ICustomBootstrap interface. Unity runs your ICustomBootstrap implementation with the default world so that you can modify or entirely replace the system creation and initialization sequence.

You can also disable the default World creation entirely by defining the following global symbols:

• #UNITY_DISABLE_AUTOMATIC_SYSTEM_BOOTSTRAP_RUNTIME_WORLD disables generation of the default runtime World.
• #UNITY_DISABLE_AUTOMATIC_SYSTEM_BOOTSTRAP_EDITOR_WORLD disables generation of the default Editor World.
• #UNITY_DISABLE_AUTOMATIC_SYSTEM_BOOTSTRAP disables generation of both default Worlds.

Your code is then responsible for creating any needed worlds, and instantiating and updating systems. You can use the Unity scriptable PlayerLoop to modify the normal Unity player loop so that your systems are updated when required.