A few months ago I ran a survey to find out which programming-languages people were using with Entity Systems: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18JF6uCHI0nZ1-Yel76uZzL1UfFMI21QvDlcnXSGXSHo/viewform I’m about to publish a Patreon article on Entity Systems (here if you want to support me), but I wanted to put something up on my blog at the same […]
entity systems
36 posts
A lot of us have been looking at alternative engines recently, and for me the biggest challenge is that the intersection between “game engine I can use easily” and “programming language I am willing to use” is quite small. That got me thinking: if you started a new commercial ES […]
I love researching and writing about Entity Systems, but it takes me days or weeks to make a single article. I’ve written almost nothing for the past 18 months because on my current salary I can’t afford the time off work. So … now I’m crowdfunding the long, detailed, in-depth […]
I periodically write massive long documents detailing all the bugs in Unity that I know, have memorized, and have to workaround on a day-to-day / hour-to-hour basis. But it makes me so angry and frustrated – so much terrible coding, so little technology-leadership at the company – that I end […]
This has come up a few times, and I ended up replying on Twitter: @t_machine_org any thoughts of using 128bit guids for entity-ids? too big? — Richard Kogelnig (@RichardKogelnig) June 9, 2015 But that’s a crappy way to find things later, so I made a quick-and-dirty infographic with a few […]
Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: screenshots of the Unity Editor with explanation of the new features I’ve added Third: Challenges and solutions I’ve […]
Recap: previous posts on Unity3D and designing an efficient Entity Systems add-on library, using structs to store data in C#. But …
(One of a series of posts about converting Unity3D into a 1st-class Entity Component System. Read others here) It’s a year and a half since I wrote about choosing Data Structures for high-performance Entity Systems in A-AAA games. I always had a followup post in mind, but never wrote it […]
(One of a series of posts about converting Unity3D into a 1st-class Entity Component System. Read others here) How to store game data: GameObject? MonoBehaviour? ScriptableObject? Those three pillars of Unity’s architecture are the curse of game implementation and performance. Architecturally, they’re great: they’re a big part of what makes […]
A first-class Entity System for Unity3D Unity is a great 3D engine and a good editor – but the programming environment is 10-15 years behind the curve. Entity Systems are a much better way of writing games, but they are surprisingly difficult to add to Unity. I’ll bring the latest […]
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how a high-quality ECS would appear / present itself within Unity, how it would interact with standard Unity3d game-code at the API level, how it would appear in the Unity Editor, etc. This evening, I had a go at making some of that […]
Entity Systems in Unity… some examples of the problems This is a new series of blog posts, where I’m going to document specific ways + concrete examples in which Unity fails (sometimes spectacularly) as an “ECS” game engine. I like Unity; but the core architecture (which is very old) is […]
This year, one of my goals was to build a sane, powerful, viable Entity System / Entity-Component System within Unity3D. Something I could build current and future games on, and save a lot of dev-time (both in ease-of-use and in easily adding missing features that I wish Unity had). @t_machine_org […]
Entity Systems are widely used in gamedev and starting to appear in mainstream IT / software development. But we want MORE developers and designers to benefit from this… So, Richard Lord and I are going to do a mini conference on ES ideas/designs/uses/implementation/etc. I’ll arrange venue, agenda (e.g. a Keynote) […]
The Entity Systems wiki is pretty good – simple source-code examples in 5 different languages, and links to 10 x richer, more complex “frameworks”. But it’s got little (almost nothing) in links to articles, introductions, tutorials on the topic. I know there’s a lot that’s been written – just look […]
This year I’m working on two different projects that need an Entity System (ES). One of them is a non-game app written natively on iOS + Android. The other is an FPS in Unity3D. There are good, basic Open-Source ES’s out there today (and c.f. the sidebar there). I tried […]
I’ve started a new open-source project to make an ES designed specifically to be ported to different platforms and work the same way, with the same class/method names, on every platform: Aliqua.org Here’s some thoughts on “why” I’m doing this, and “how” I’m making it work…
I wanted to try the latest version of Artemis, and I had an old game project that was quickly written in OOP style. So I went looking for an ObjC port… Existing port: outdated There was a port linked on the Artemis site that was OK – but had no […]
In 2014, I’ll be making a new game in Unity that makes intensive use of an Entity System. This will give me lots of ammo for a new post exploring the pros and cons of Unity’s “partial” Entity System architecture. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the last […]