Dev Diary: Learned Jobs, Lost Frames, Gained Wisdom

Tried rewriting with Unity’s Job System, but because the data set was small, it ended up slower, so I rolled everything back. In short: no actual changes.

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Recently, I heard about Unity’s new multithreaded system: Jobs + Entities, supposedly offering speed boosts of 10x, even up to 200x. I had no idea what it was, but it looked really complicated.

I asked an AI how long it’d take to learn. It said “half a year,” and I panicked — thought it was going to be math-class levels of pain.

I hesitated for a long time, mentally preparing myself, before I started. And of course… turns out the AI was confidently lying again. It didn’t take nearly that long.

That said — yeah, the beginning was full of pain. Certain Unity packages just wouldn’t install. I tried importing tutorial files and was greeted with a full-screen wall of error messages.

But I didn’t fall apart sobbing. (Crying wouldn’t help anyway, right?) Whenever I got too tired, I’d just go watch some funny shows. Then once I felt better, I’d come back and keep learning.

To be honest, the learning process was so hard that I ended up watching a lot of shows. I even wrote a full psychological breakdown of both the protagonist and the villain — just checked: 28,370 words. It felt like school again — making zero progress in the textbook, but remembering every joke the teacher told in vivid detail.

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Eventually, I finally got the hang of it. I rewrote the “find nearest item” logic using Jobs… …and the game got slower.

Sometimes dropping to 20 FPS, which is really bad. Before the rewrite, it was holding steady at 80+ FPS.

That’s when I realized: NativeArray comes with overhead. For small data sets, it actually hurts performance.

So… I rolled it back. Still, not a total waste — I learned something that might help with the next game.

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If you’re curious what I’ve been learning, here’s the Unity official documentation: https://learn.unity.com/course/basics-dots-jobs-entities/tutorial/get-started-with-unitys-job-system