Doryen VS entt

Aw, thanks friend! Just using libtcod and a handful of basic ones for maths-related stuff and saving/loading, nothing remotely specialist on that side of things. All the code for generating graphics for instance is based on libtcod, but definitely using the functionality in novel ways!

See the libtcod repo for everything. The contributing file has info on how to configure CMake. Feel free to make an issue, discussion, or PR there if any changes are needed or you have anything you want to ask about.

libtcod | GitHub | Issues | Forum | Changelog | Documentation | Template

Today I'm back to working on Pataro, the roguelike built on libtcod that made up much of my Hacktoberfest efforts. I had been assigned to an issue requesting the addition of serialization and deserialization, but unfortunately ran out of time and wasn't able to finish the former or start the latter. I ran into issues with Cereal, and had a hard time figuring out the structure of the program and how to go about implementing serialization for all the relevant components. At the end of that attempt I mentioned that if I were to try again I'd start by testing out Cereal separately and getting a handle on that before trying to implement it in Pataro - so that's what I'm doing today.

One of the biggest problems I've faced while tackling this has been figuring out the structure of the program. I've never worked on a game before so the structure of how all the different pieces fit together is alien to me, but I've been slowly figuring it out over the past days and weeks. After getting in touch with the developer of (Pataro)[https://github.com/SuperFola/pataro] and reading tutorials on developing with (libtcod)[https://github.com/libtcod/libtcod] I think I have a better idea of how to approach it.

This month I'm working on participating in Hacktoberfest, starting with contributing to a roguelike game called Pataro built on the libtcod roguelike development library. I chose to work on adding a serialization mechanism to save the player's progress and so far it's involved a lot of new and challenging processes. I haven't completed my work yet but wanted to start sharing progress on my learning and status.

If you're willing to stick to the terminal for now, libtcod is popular for tutorials on building roguelikes.

The same thing happened to me as happened to you, I also hate Libtcod, and it's because of its poor code interpolation with C++ and its null documentation, so I also decided to create a Fork and work on it, the result, an ASCII render with a simple to use, scalable, clean and maintainable interface.

libtcod | GitHub | Issues | Forum | Changelog | Documentation

Like you, I also had the same problem when reviewing the Libtcod code, so I decided to write an engine based on the Libtcod 1.5 code, I am currently still working on it, and I plan to add elements to it to make interfaces using flexbox layout.

EnTT is a popular alternative to flecs for C++, which has different performance/memory characteristics.

https://pastebin.com/VPypiitk This is a very small experiment i did to learn the metaprogramming features. its an ECS library using the same model as entt (https://github.com/skypjack/entt). In 200 lines or so it does the equivalent of a few thousand lines of template heavy Cpp while compiling instantly and generating good debug code.

Some walkthrough:

Line 8 declares a SparseSet type as a fairly typical template. its just a struct with arrays of type T inside. Next lines implement getters/setters for this data structure

Line 46 Base_Registry things get interesting. This is a struct that holds a bunch of SparseSet of different types, and providers getters/setters for them by type. It uses code generation to do this. The initial #insert at the start of the class injects codegen that creates structure members from the type list the struct gets on its declaration. Note also how type-lists are a native structure in the lang, no need for variadics.

Line 99 i decide to do variadic style tail templates anyway for fun. I implement a function that takes a typelist and returns the tail, and the struct is created through recursion as one would do in cpp. Getters and setters for the View struct are also implemented through recursion

Line 143 has the for expansion. This is how you overload the for loop functionality to create custom iterators.

The rest of the code is just some basic test code that runs the thing.

Since we wanted a common game simulation that would be on both the server and the client we looked into a few libraries that would fit our ECS needs. It was decided we were going to write this common part of our game in C++, but rust was considered. C++ was a familiar language for us so naturally EnTT and flecs came up right away. I had used EnTT before, writing some small demo projects, so our choice was made based on familiarity. In order to integrate with Unity we created a small C interface to communicate between our simulation code and Unity’s C#. Here’s close to what it looked like. I removed some parts for brevity sake.

Are you sure you don't want to use a C++ package manager? Libtcod is on Vcpkg and with that setup you could add the fmt library or EnTT. fmt fixes C++'s string handling and EnTT fixes everything wrong with the entities of the previous tutorials.

There's also a performance question. While we can now use Blueprint nativization to convert Blueprints to C++ the result will be a fairly naive version, fast enough for most purposes but not if you're trying to push every bit of performance. This is where you're looking at making sure you're hitting things such as using the CPU cache as well as possible for an ECS system (Look at ENTT or Flecs if you want to see what they're about and why you'd want one), or a system needing to process massive amounts of data quickly such as the Voxel Plugin.

For a modern engine you’re probably best looking at Unity’s DOTS. You may also want to check out some of the different open source ECS libraries such as flecs and EnTT are two popular ones for C++, but there’s lots of them. Largely you’ll see lots of different approaches taken, all with their own pros and cons. Not all of them will be performant (some focus more on the design benefits) while others will be optimised for certain use cases. What you should prioritise will depend on your specific needs.

You can think of DynaMix as combining one of these libraries with an ECS like entt(https://github.com/skypjack/entt)