5 ms·

This fits my gut feeling every time I see an ECS system that videogame design has gotten stuck in a local maxima abstraction/pattern. Often what they really wan

This fits my gut feeling every time I see an ECS system that videogame design has gotten stuck in a local maxima abstraction/pattern. Often what they really want is a Monadic abstraction of a data/state transformation process, but they are often stuck in languages ("for performance reasons") that make it hard to impossible to get good Monadic abstractions. So instead they use the hammers that to make nails of the abstractions that they can get. ECS feels to me like a strange attempt to build Self-like OO dynamic prototypes in a class-based OO language, and that's almost exactly what you would expect for an industry only just now taking baby steps outside of C/C++. C# has some good tools to head towards that direction (async/await is a powerful Monadic transformer, for instance; it's not a generic enough transformer on its own of course, but an interesting start), but as this article points out most videogames work in C# today still has to keep the back foot in C/C++ land at all times and C/C++ mentalities are still going to clip the wings of abstraction work. (ETA: Local maxima are still useful of course! Just that I'd like to point out that they can also be a trap.)

learc83 5y ago
>"for performance reasons" The quotes imply that this is a bad reason, but in soft realtime systems you often want complete control of memory allocation. Even in the case of something like Unity--in order to give developers the performance they want--they've designed subset of C# they call high performance C# where memory is manually allocated. In most cases if you're using an ECS, it's because you care so much about performance that you want to organize most of your data around cache locality. If you don't care about performance, something like the classic Unity Game Object component architecture is a lot easier to work with.
- unknownOrigin 5y ago
  Yea, you're right, I think the previous poster seriouspy underestimates videogames as performance critical (and performance consistent!) apps. In the modern days of desktop Java and C# (and even more in web dev) the vast majority of coders just don't come across the need to "do everything you need to do" in 33ms or less, consistently.
  - waste_monk 5y ago
    That's 16.66ms, if you want to hit 60FPS. Or 11.11ms if you're targeting 90FPS for VR applications. Big respect to the work (and the people behind that work) that goes into getting modern AAA games to hit these targets.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  I'm not implying it is a bad reason with the quotes, I'm trying to imply that it is a misguided reason (even if it has good intentions). The "rule" that C/C++ is always "more performant" is just wrong. It's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy that because the games industry has a lot of (constantly reinvented) experience in performance optimizing C/C++ that they can't get the same or better benefits if they used better languages and higher abstractions. (It's the exact same sunk cost fallacy that a previous games industry generation said C/C++ would never beat hand-tuned Assembly and it wasn't worth trying.) In Enterprise day jobs I've seen a ton of "high performance" C# with regular garbage collection. Performance optimizing C# and garbage collection is a different art than performance optimizing manually allocated memory code, but it is an art/science that exists. I've even seen some very high performance games written entirely in C# and not "high performance C#" but the real thing with honest garbage collection. (It's a different art to performance optimize C# code but it isn't even that different, at a high level a lot of the techniques are very similar like knowing when to use shared pools or deciding when you can entirely stack allocate a structure instead of pushing it elsewhere in memory, etc.) The implication in the discussion above is that a possible huge sweet spot for a lot of game development would actually be a language a lot more like Haskell, if not just Haskell. A lot of the "ECS" abstraction boils away into the ether if you have proper Monads and a nice do-notation for working with them. You'd get something of the best of both worlds that you could write what looks like the usual imperative code games have "always" been written in, but with the additional power of a higher abstraction and more complex combinators than what are often written by hand (many, many times over) in ECS systems. So far I've not seen any production videogame even flirt with a language like Haskell. It clearly doesn't look anything like C/C++ so there's no imagination for how performant it might actually be to write a game in it (outside of hobbyist toys). But there are High Frequency Trading companies out there using Haskell in production. It can clearly hit some strong performant numbers. The art to doing so is even more different from C/C++ than C#'s is, but it exists and there are experts out there doing it. Performance is a good reason to do things, but I think the videogames industry tends to especially lean on "performance" as a crutch to avoid learning new things. I think as an industry there's a lot of reason to avoid engaging more experts and expertise in programming languages and their performance optimization methodologies when it is far easier to train "passionate" teens extremely over-simplified (and generally wrong) maxims like "C++ will always be more performant than C#" than to keep up with the actual state of the art. I think the games industry is happiest, for a number of reasons, not exploring better options outside of local maxima and "performance" is an easily available excuse.

learc83 5y ago

>"for performance reasons" The quotes imply that this is a bad reason, but in soft realtime systems you often want complete control of memory allocation. Even in the case of something like Unity--in order to give developers the performance they want--they've designed subset of C# they call high performance C# where memory is manually allocated. In most cases if you're using an ECS, it's because you care so much about performance that you want to organize most of your data around cache locality. If you don't care about performance, something like the classic Unity Game Object component architecture is a lot easier to work with.

unknownOrigin 5y ago
Yea, you're right, I think the previous poster seriouspy underestimates videogames as performance critical (and performance consistent!) apps. In the modern days of desktop Java and C# (and even more in web dev) the vast majority of coders just don't come across the need to "do everything you need to do" in 33ms or less, consistently.
- waste_monk 5y ago
  That's 16.66ms, if you want to hit 60FPS. Or 11.11ms if you're targeting 90FPS for VR applications. Big respect to the work (and the people behind that work) that goes into getting modern AAA games to hit these targets.
WorldMaker 5y ago
I'm not implying it is a bad reason with the quotes, I'm trying to imply that it is a misguided reason (even if it has good intentions). The "rule" that C/C++ is always "more performant" is just wrong. It's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy that because the games industry has a lot of (constantly reinvented) experience in performance optimizing C/C++ that they can't get the same or better benefits if they used better languages and higher abstractions. (It's the exact same sunk cost fallacy that a previous games industry generation said C/C++ would never beat hand-tuned Assembly and it wasn't worth trying.) In Enterprise day jobs I've seen a ton of "high performance" C# with regular garbage collection. Performance optimizing C# and garbage collection is a different art than performance optimizing manually allocated memory code, but it is an art/science that exists. I've even seen some very high performance games written entirely in C# and not "high performance C#" but the real thing with honest garbage collection. (It's a different art to performance optimize C# code but it isn't even that different, at a high level a lot of the techniques are very similar like knowing when to use shared pools or deciding when you can entirely stack allocate a structure instead of pushing it elsewhere in memory, etc.) The implication in the discussion above is that a possible huge sweet spot for a lot of game development would actually be a language a lot more like Haskell, if not just Haskell. A lot of the "ECS" abstraction boils away into the ether if you have proper Monads and a nice do-notation for working with them. You'd get something of the best of both worlds that you could write what looks like the usual imperative code games have "always" been written in, but with the additional power of a higher abstraction and more complex combinators than what are often written by hand (many, many times over) in ECS systems. So far I've not seen any production videogame even flirt with a language like Haskell. It clearly doesn't look anything like C/C++ so there's no imagination for how performant it might actually be to write a game in it (outside of hobbyist toys). But there are High Frequency Trading companies out there using Haskell in production. It can clearly hit some strong performant numbers. The art to doing so is even more different from C/C++ than C#'s is, but it exists and there are experts out there doing it. Performance is a good reason to do things, but I think the videogames industry tends to especially lean on "performance" as a crutch to avoid learning new things. I think as an industry there's a lot of reason to avoid engaging more experts and expertise in programming languages and their performance optimization methodologies when it is far easier to train "passionate" teens extremely over-simplified (and generally wrong) maxims like "C++ will always be more performant than C#" than to keep up with the actual state of the art. I think the games industry is happiest, for a number of reasons, not exploring better options outside of local maxima and "performance" is an easily available excuse.