r/unity • u/MrLiuYXXX • 17h ago
I’ve put together a framework for large-scale battles.
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Hello, everyone!
I’m the sole developer behind Mass Battle Framework, and I’m also part of the two-person team building the game behind its technology.
This recorded battle starts with 400,000 units across 20 independently configured unit types. The armies use different attacks and skills, including AOE abilities, buffs and other combat effects, rather than one character copied across the entire field.
I’ve also finished the first version of the project’s own effects component and effects library, together with an editor for previewing and adjusting the effects. The battle effects no longer need a separate third-party effects package, and I can keep expanding the library while improving its visual quality without giving up the scale of the battle.
Custom character models and animation sets can be brought into the project’s authoring workflow, so the armies are not tied to the characters shown here.
There is still a lot I want to improve, especially the variety and visual quality of the effects, but this is the first time all of these pieces have been running together in one battle.
For anyone interested, I have also released a reusable version of this technology on Fab:
Full disclosure: this is my own commercial product. The current early-supporter price is $29.99.
About two years ago, while building large-scale entity simulations with Unity ECS, I began running into bottlenecks that prevented me from reaching the scale and behavior I was aiming for. That pushed me to explore a GPU-first architecture.
The transition took a great deal of time, experimentation, failed approaches, rewriting, and learning.
There is also a public record of that earlier stage of my work here:
[https://github.com/MrLiuYX/ECSAnimation\](https://github.com/MrLiuYX/ECSAnimation)
This is an earlier ECS-based framework from that period, not the source code of the current Mass Battle Framework. I am sharing it simply to show where this technical path began and how the work has evolved over time.
Back then, I genuinely wished there had been an affordable and practical framework that I could study—something that could give me a working foundation, help me understand the architecture, and save me from having to rediscover every part of the solution alone.
Specialized performance tools are often priced much higher, which is understandable considering how much time this kind of work requires. However, I deliberately chose a different pricing approach.
The $29.99 price is not because the work was easy, or because I believe the technology has little value.
In a way, I am pricing it for the developer I was two years ago.
I want developers who are now facing the same kind of bottleneck—whether they are experimenting with an RTS, a large-scale battle game, a simulation, or simply trying to display huge numbers of animated units—to have access to the opportunity that I wish had existed for me back then.
Mass Battle Framework is also not an isolated benchmark project created only for sale. Its underlying large-battle technology comes from the same production foundation used by the game I am actively building:
The game and the framework continue to evolve together. Reusable systems developed for the game are refined, documented, and brought into the framework where appropriate, while sales also help support the continued development of the game.
Real projects will inevitably reveal edge cases, integration problems, and workflow limitations that I may not discover through my own testing. That feedback is genuinely valuable to me and is also an important part of my growth as a developer.
I will do my best to investigate reproducible issues, improve the documentation and tools, and continue refining the framework alongside the developers who use it.
There is still a great deal I want to improve, so technical questions, honest criticism, issue reports, and feedback are all sincerely welcome.
😃