2 ms·

That point (keeping interactive rates) is basically one of the most important factors driving the architecture of game engines. I found this talk to be quite a

That point (keeping interactive rates) is basically one of the most important factors driving the architecture of game engines. I found this talk to be quite a good one regarding architecture for game engines (it's about the ECS in Overwatch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3aieHjyNvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3aieHjyNvw I feel like Unity's "entity as a container of components, things are OO'd and there's a lot of polymorphic dispatch / existence checks / branching" is starting to feel out of fashion as of late, and the ECS approach is something folks have come around to. I've been playing around with such an engine for a side project. Here's a quick video -- https://imgur.com/a/BcnWJha https://imgur.com/a/BcnWJha -- you can see what the in-game editor looks like + some of the physics of the game (the game and editor run both in web and natively). I think with the ECS-queries approach the code comes out to be quite ergonomic. For example, I've highlighted the logic that makes the player be obscured by objects in front of them here: https://gist.github.com/nikki93/8cc5d99e45ad74e7f1053dbef2874e56#file-main-cc-L195-L213 https://gist.github.com/nikki93/8cc5d99e45ad74e7f1053dbef287... The game-specific code for the whole game is in that 'main.cc' file and comes out to about 500 lines. The game also includes custom inspector UIs for the 'Sprite' and 'Feet' components that are defined right in that file on line 288-314 and you can see them in the video.

danbolt 6y ago
> I think with the ECS-queries approach the code comes out to be quite ergonomic. I tend to agree, and I think it's something that doesn't get promoted enough as an advantage of ECS compared to cache hits and parallelism. When a programmer wants to add a new feature to a game, they can slot their system into the game's tick and avoid stepping on their peer's work as much. They won't need to edit `Entity.cs` or an inheritance tree, and it's much easier to reason about the order of updating game data per frame. It also makes code ownership and code reuse a bit easier to divide up too. I'd take an ECS system even with a performance penalty, as the organizational benefits really add up over time.
- nikki93 6y ago
  Glad to see some agreement there. I'm interested in building an ECS-based approach for a UI system at some point. The Yoga layout engine (implements flexbox -- https://github.com/facebook/yoga/tree/master/yoga https://github.com/facebook/yoga/tree/master/yoga) seems to actually be pretty amenable to just incorporating as a `Layout` or `Flex` component, then you could have components for platform-specific renderings (eg. `iOSTextInput`, `AndroidTextInput`, `DOMTextInput` in wasm, ...) that could read from cross-platform common components (`TextInput`). A core aspect would also be a `Hierarchy` component that just has a parent entity id and a list of child entity ids (that it keeps in sync properly). Then bind things to JS and allow you to code it from React, while still being able to eg. run an animation thread for some specific animations that just queries and reads/writes the `Layout` and `AnimationSpec`s etc. Interesting talk re: data oriented design for a webby animation engine here actually: https://youtu.be/yy8jQgmhbAU?t=620 https://youtu.be/yy8jQgmhbAU?t=620

danbolt 6y ago

> I think with the ECS-queries approach the code comes out to be quite ergonomic. I tend to agree, and I think it's something that doesn't get promoted enough as an advantage of ECS compared to cache hits and parallelism. When a programmer wants to add a new feature to a game, they can slot their system into the game's tick and avoid stepping on their peer's work as much. They won't need to edit `Entity.cs` or an inheritance tree, and it's much easier to reason about the order of updating game data per frame. It also makes code ownership and code reuse a bit easier to divide up too. I'd take an ECS system even with a performance penalty, as the organizational benefits really add up over time.

nikki93 6y ago
Glad to see some agreement there. I'm interested in building an ECS-based approach for a UI system at some point. The Yoga layout engine (implements flexbox -- https://github.com/facebook/yoga/tree/master/yoga https://github.com/facebook/yoga/tree/master/yoga) seems to actually be pretty amenable to just incorporating as a `Layout` or `Flex` component, then you could have components for platform-specific renderings (eg. `iOSTextInput`, `AndroidTextInput`, `DOMTextInput` in wasm, ...) that could read from cross-platform common components (`TextInput`). A core aspect would also be a `Hierarchy` component that just has a parent entity id and a list of child entity ids (that it keeps in sync properly). Then bind things to JS and allow you to code it from React, while still being able to eg. run an animation thread for some specific animations that just queries and reads/writes the `Layout` and `AnimationSpec`s etc. Interesting talk re: data oriented design for a webby animation engine here actually: https://youtu.be/yy8jQgmhbAU?t=620 https://youtu.be/yy8jQgmhbAU?t=620