flecs VS SDL

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.

I don't know for sure, but could it be this?

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

The kit has been fun. My daughter loved helping me wire it up to a dummy box, and we decided its worth moving forward with a desktop cabinet build. I don't have a raspberry pi and can't find one, so we're using a 2012 mac mini. OpenEmu has been fun, but I'd like to be able to control the whole UI with the joystick, so we looked at EmulationStation-DE (retropie for desktop as its been explained to me). The control kit worked with OpenEmu but not EmulationStation, and the folks over in that sub said its not supported by SDL https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

There is also SDL, which is a bit of a behemoth library, but gives you a lot of firepower if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of building something from scratch with media. It provides a framework for working with graphics, sound, input hardware, etc., and is cross-platform. I haven't personally used SDL but it's a pretty well-utilized library. It's written in C so the same caveats apply as before, but works just fine with C++.

This has already been fixed in the latest SDL version, but it's likely that the game comes bundled with it's own version.

I got tired of writing C# bindings code by hand to interop with native C/C++ libraries, so I automated the process. Example for SDL: https://github.com/bottlenoselabs/SDL-cs. The repository is automated daily using Dependabot to run C2CS, generate the P/Invoke code, and push a Git commit with the code automatically when there is a change to https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.

The source code for it can be found at https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL , this may be helpful if your looking for an example of how a 'platform layer' like this it can be implemented.

Simple Directmedia Layer: a library that offers low-level access to resources like audio, video graphics, joystick, keyboard, mouse. It is mainly used for the development of video games (Stepmania and Valve's games such as Counter Strike: Source, as some examples).

Now, we'll need to source the latest SDL source tarball. You can find it [here](https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL), but you can source the latest as of this writing with the command below. Run cd, and then run:

Game library: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL