[ncake]

Unpopular opinion, but I personally think ECS has no place in C/C++ game dev. Every supposed advantage is either curbed by limitations of the language (e.g. serialization) or can be implemented more logically in a stateless manner.

[jayd16]

In some ways ECS could be considered stateless, as the entity holds the game state as raw data, while the system operates on that data without holding a state of its own.

How would you implement ECS, a system for tracking the state of game entities, in a stateless manner? Can you expand on that?

[ncake]

I'll try to explain what I mean. Suppose you want an in game character to change the displayed weapon in their inventory.

Stateful way: your Inventory Manager component iterates through its private array of item entities to mark their model components as shown or hidden, then calls the dependency injected character's avatar component to update its animation state.

Stateless way: you flip an integer in character's struct, and the rendering function does something different.

[chmod775]

I don't think the terminology you're looking for is not stateful/stateless, it's single source of truth vs multiple.

The latter is an anti-pattern, and you can do either with ECS.

With ECS nothing prevents you from just having the "physical" game state as the single source of truth, and having the render function for the player inventories look at it.

[jazzfool]

The "stateful" way you present is not at all how you would approach that problem in an ECS. I think you misunderstand what ECS refers to.

[ShrigmaMale]

Maybe for ECS newbie, please say more on how you would approach this problem?

[jayd16]

ECS is closer to the second way that was described. Data is represented as arrays of structs (referred to as components), similar to what was described. Systems can mutate or read these structs.

A physics system might change the position components while a decoupled rendering system might read that position components and the rendering details components to add draw commands.

[BoorishBears]

I can't even imagine game dev without ECS. There's more performant architectures but it's such a useful mental model for the type of rapid iteration games need that so many people are willing to put up with the drawbacks

[verdagon]

What are some of the more performant architectures?

[BoorishBears]

Data oriented instead of object oriented:

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/what-is-data-o...

Instead of treating each object as a collection of components, you can operate on bags of components

So say in you're modeling space invaders:

  every frame: 
    for enemy in enemies              
      enemy.transform.y += 10

The CPU is hopping to a random memory address where your "transform" component is located before modifying it, over and over.

Data oriented would be something like:

    each frame:
      for transform in transforms
         if transform is enemy
            transform.y += 10
         if transform is player
            transform += input 
 

So you get cache locality as you're running through your transforms.

Now imagine if instead of space invaders we're trying to model say blades of grass. Suddenly we go from a very cache unfriendly method to something that's cache friendly, branch prediction friendly, and easy to parallelize.

If you want to experiment with it Unity has some great examples under their new DOTS system

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemS...

APIs can make data oriented more ergonomic than my contrived example implies, but it's still not nearly as intuitive as ECS imo.

To me data oriented subsystems are fine, but not as a core concept for your game's architecture.