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I doubt any professional gamedev would reach for ECS. No major game engine has a finished ECS system yet. You would have to roll it all yourself and shoehorn it

I doubt any professional gamedev would reach for ECS. No major game engine has a finished ECS system yet. You would have to roll it all yourself and shoehorn it into the engine somehow. Unity has not shipped DOTS. They actually removed it from the Package Manager last year. Joachim says it has a bright future, but I suspect it will never ship in Unity itself. Epic has nothing in Unreal yet, though apparently a few months ago somebody spotted some changes in repository that suggests one may be on the way.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> No major game engine has a finished ECS system yet. The major engines may not have ECS built in, but some of them are supported by ECS systems that are readily available. Your implicit restriction of professional gamedevs to include only people who both use a major game engine but don't use third party components not supplied by the engine is, I think, overly restrictive.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I expect the programmer who liked working with an ECS system would have a hard time making a business case for taking on the additional risk of a third party ECS foundation. A traditional OO architecture will provide all the performance you need to create a modern Simcity style game without having to take on the additional problems of potential bugs in the underlying code, training everybody to understand and use it, and not even really knowing if the end result will be significantly faster or not. Where I work we think long and hard about adding any third-party packages to the project. The benefits have to be very real, for the budget or for the player.
  - lewispollard 5y ago
    There are a tonne of open source, MIT licensed ECS libraries in pretty much every language you can write a game in. And, at the end of the day, ECS frameworks aren't all that complicated at their core, it's not hard to roll your own, though libraries will have better querying features and optimisations. The benefit is to the developer, arguably the most important part of the game development process. It can save a lot of headaches that OO hierarchies can create, makes things more easily concurrent, allows for more flexibility in behaviour and emergent gameplay. ECS helps to prevent bugs in game object logic, by keeping state and behaviour separate from its corresponding entity. If I'm looking for some behavior, I don't have to start thinking about which ring of the inheritance chain it ended up on, I just find the component or system that does that thing. It encourages you to write state and behaviour in a way that works with any entity and can be attached to anything at any time without crashes and state mutation problems or race conditions.
reificator 5y ago
Dungeon Siege[0] shipped in 2002. Unity began their ECS journey by sniping talent from Insomniac. ECS is not an unproven concept in someone's head. That Unity and Unreal are lacking (even after Unity's public efforts in the area) is because they are licensed en masse and retrofitting each with an ECS would be no small feat. And is that refactor worth losing revenue from obsoleted marketplace content? Or does the ECS need to interoperate perfectly with existing code from endless numbers of existing projects while still providing the benefits of a dedicated solution? Unity and Unreal are not the only engines. In house engines are shaped by the needs of the immediate users, and not the sales pitch for hobbyists or third party studios. [0]: https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/data-driven-game-object-system.pdf https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/data-driven-game-object-sys...

dragonwriter 5y ago

> No major game engine has a finished ECS system yet. The major engines may not have ECS built in, but some of them are supported by ECS systems that are readily available. Your implicit restriction of professional gamedevs to include only people who both use a major game engine but don't use third party components not supplied by the engine is, I think, overly restrictive.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I expect the programmer who liked working with an ECS system would have a hard time making a business case for taking on the additional risk of a third party ECS foundation. A traditional OO architecture will provide all the performance you need to create a modern Simcity style game without having to take on the additional problems of potential bugs in the underlying code, training everybody to understand and use it, and not even really knowing if the end result will be significantly faster or not. Where I work we think long and hard about adding any third-party packages to the project. The benefits have to be very real, for the budget or for the player.
- lewispollard 5y ago
  There are a tonne of open source, MIT licensed ECS libraries in pretty much every language you can write a game in. And, at the end of the day, ECS frameworks aren't all that complicated at their core, it's not hard to roll your own, though libraries will have better querying features and optimisations. The benefit is to the developer, arguably the most important part of the game development process. It can save a lot of headaches that OO hierarchies can create, makes things more easily concurrent, allows for more flexibility in behaviour and emergent gameplay. ECS helps to prevent bugs in game object logic, by keeping state and behaviour separate from its corresponding entity. If I'm looking for some behavior, I don't have to start thinking about which ring of the inheritance chain it ended up on, I just find the component or system that does that thing. It encourages you to write state and behaviour in a way that works with any entity and can be attached to anything at any time without crashes and state mutation problems or race conditions.

reificator 5y ago

Dungeon Siege[0] shipped in 2002. Unity began their ECS journey by sniping talent from Insomniac. ECS is not an unproven concept in someone's head. That Unity and Unreal are lacking (even after Unity's public efforts in the area) is because they are licensed en masse and retrofitting each with an ECS would be no small feat. And is that refactor worth losing revenue from obsoleted marketplace content? Or does the ECS need to interoperate perfectly with existing code from endless numbers of existing projects while still providing the benefits of a dedicated solution? Unity and Unreal are not the only engines. In house engines are shaped by the needs of the immediate users, and not the sales pitch for hobbyists or third party studios. [0]: https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/data-driven-game-object-system.pdf https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/data-driven-game-object-sys...