Object-Oriented Entity-Component-System Design

• entt

  79 9,497 9.8 C++

  Gaming meets modern C++ - a fast and reliable entity component system (ECS) and much more

> Anyone solved this before?

Sure. Take a look at EnTT[1], a popular C++ ECS library. It comes with two main tools to deal with this: Sorting[2] and groups[3]. EnTT gives you a large spectrum of tools with different trade-offs so that you can tune your code based on usage patterns. Obviously different bits of code will have conflicting access patterns, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution, but EnTT lets you optimise the patterns that are most important to you (based on profiling, hopefully).

[1] https://github.com/skypjack/entt

[2] Sort one component to be in the same order as another component, so that they can be efficiently accessed together: https://github.com/skypjack/entt/wiki/Crash-Course:-entity-c...

[3] https://github.com/skypjack/entt/wiki/Crash-Course:-entity-c...

• habitat

  4 2,570 9.8 Rust

  Modern applications with built-in automation

  

Personal anecdote: Habitat was developed as a sort of application deployment / configuration management tool in Rust, and the architecture there is roughly equivalent to an ECS. I found it a joy to work with and work on. Not sure if it's fundamentally a better software pattern, but it at least meshes with my brain better than how most OO-style software is laid out.

https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• froggy

  5 300 3.2 Rust

  Component Graph System experiment

What I found in practice is that many people start using the ECS for speed, and then draw themselves into a corner of the design space. Now they have to weight every step on "how would it work in ECS?", and dedicate effort to fight the ECS paradigm.

For example, a mesh may contain multiple materials. Is each material chunk a separate entity? Or maybe each bone in a skeleton is a separate entity with its own "parent" and "transform" plus other component.

One of the different approaches is component graph systems [1]. It lacks the ability to mix and match components, but provides a more natural (and simpler) model to program for.

[1] https://github.com/kvark/froggy/wiki/Component-Graph-System

• Hazel

  9 11,246 1.8 C++

  Hazel Engine

IIRC, all those engines provide an ECS that could be compared to entt.

Also, there is Hazel[0] which is based on entt and is the subject of an amazing youtube series[1].

IMHO, tinier means less features, at that point what could be considered comparable?

  [0] - https://github.com/TheCherno/Hazel

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