ecs-faq VS EntityComponentSystemS

The Wikipedia article provides a broad overview, while this FAQ offers a more systematic exploration: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq

Sparsey is an Entity Component System focused on flexibility, conciseness and providing features exclusive to its sparse set-based implementation.

For further reading, here is a great article about these different approaches within Rust specifically: https://csherratt.github.io/blog/posts/specs-and-legion/ and here is a great general resource for commonly-used terms and techniques in ECS development: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq

Godot has a node based system (nodes can have child nodes linked to them, and there are different types of nodes for the type of functionality they represent). Another alternative could be a more OOP approach (utilising inheritance as the main means of extending functionality), not aware of any modern engines that take this approach anymore. It’s also worth noting that ECS implementations can differ wildly, this faq from the flecs creator has a good rundown on what some of different variants are.

You might wanna take a look at https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq, it lays this all out better than I can.

To find more about ECS, see the FAQ: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq/blob/master/README.md

Using the relational model for app data in memory is really interesting.

Martin Fowler wrote about doing that as a way to get around the "object-relational mismatch" issue[1]. Richard Fabian describes "data-oriented design" as having a lot of overlap with the relational model[2]. ECSes becoming very popular in game engines are basically in-memory relational databases where "components" are "tables"[3].

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OrmHate.html

[2]: https://dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/

[3]: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq#what-is-ecs

This is the ECS FAQ I'm currently using.

While Unity's DOTS/ECS is positioned as solving performance issues for large numbers of objects, there are a number of other advantages. See https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq for a more in-depth look. IMHO the reusability and extensibility ECS encourages is as valuable as any performance increase. Compared to the GameObject style, which encourages random state mutations and side-effects, ECS enforces a more functional style, which results in code that is easier to reason about and test.

thanks, i think a little more background on the ECS world will help you get the context, this is from the author of Flecs: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq

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.