[Wesxdz]

I'm developing a mobile game in Godot that would require thousands of nodes. The lowest hanging fruit optimization is simply ditching GDScript and nodes altogether for a C++ module or GDNative. ECS imo is a requirement for non-trivial games, and I don't think any game editor has it together here because of the tendency to prioritize accessible fast iteration in early stages over performance and scalability. So they stay in the comfort zone of scene tree hierarchical representation. I'm planning to move to Jai or build a PureRef-like visual ecs editor with libclang ast reflection and hot reloading so I can escape.

[zemo]

> the tendency to prioritize accessible fast iteration in early stages over performance and scalability

well, I'm glad you're describing the way you see the tradeoffs, I just have a hard time seeing how hanging your hat on the ability to eek out every little bit of resource optimization at the expense of early iteration is a worthwhile tradeoff for the majority of gamedevs. Running the game at a worse framerate or render setting so that you can tune the gameplay early, get through many different gameplay design iterations, and get the artists and sound people working sooner seems like it would be of value to more teams than something highly performant that makes it harder to experiment and iterate. (on the ECS vs inheritance point I'm in agreement.)

[ratww]

The performance advantages of ECS are a bit of a red herring. There's not much of a tradeoff when it comes to speed of iteration.

The origins of ECS are in the work of Scott Bilas and Adam Martin, who weren't seeking performance improvements, but rather a way to allow non-technical teammates to iterate faster. This thing was revolutionary in the late 90s/early 2000s because suddenly you didn't need an army of increasingly expensive programmers just to get simple things done.

The performance boost was discovered much later when people found out that ECS could naturally benefit from data-oriented design. Performance is a nice-to-have but is far from being the raison d'être of ECS. It still makes sense to to have ECS or EC (or even just non-inheritance-component-based, like Unity) without the performance advantages of data-oriented design.

[pjmlp]

ECS like systems were well known in CS even before that.

"Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming", 1998

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201178885

[tpxl]

That counts for nothing if you have to rewrite everything from scratch 3/4 of the way in. Don't get me wrong, I like my iterations, but if your game runs at 20 fps it's simply not going to be good.