ecs-faq VS flecs

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

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

Flecs does just that: https://ajmmertens.medium.com/why-it-is-time-to-start-thinking-of-games-as-databases-e7971da33ac3

I'm trying to optimize my workflow as much as possible, and came across this thing called an ECS. After doing a little bit more digging I found some decent guides on how you would make one, I also found one premade called FLECS. FLECS is nice and all, but I was looking for something more simple that just has the bare bones of what I need and is also configurable. I haven't been able to really find anything like that, so I was wondering if anyone had an example of maybe their way of implementing an ECS. I know how to go about it, but I'm unsure of exactly what the code would look like.

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.

Repository: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs

This is the project: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs (query engine implementation lives here: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs/tree/master/src/addons/rules)

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.

If I knew C++ and I'd heard about it before I started my current project, I would have been tempted to use this https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs which can be built to WASM. Of course you still need JavaScript in the front end to link to the WASM part. I've recently been using esbuild to bundle my front end code, which does a pretty similar job to webpack, but is a bit faster.

When do think bevy will support entity-entity relationships ? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3742.

Flecs ECS already supports this: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs/blob/master/docs/Rela...

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.