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by shock-value 1742 days ago
Without commenting on whether this patent should be granted or not, I really don't think it is about ECS in general. The patent has to do with an automated system for organizing component data into arrays and chunks. The key word being "automated". You give it definitions for component data, start creating entities with combinations of those components, and it does all the rest (at runtime).

There might very well be prior art for that as well but any ECS system where the layout scheme has been defined in advance would not be relevant one way or the other. At least that is my read of all of this.

1 comments

Then doesn't a patent have to more precisely describe the "scheduler" mechanism or can they leave that out? If so. How can I know that I am not infringing the patent? My entity component system which is > 4 years old already does automatic scheduling with batches (what Unity calls chunks) to optimize the memory layout.