ECS discussion

[orchid surge]

what do you mean with SOs?

[vale spear]

scriptableobject

Although it's my first experience with unity, I'm quite happy that I could translate the typical MVC architecture into this.

SOs store the base stats, and a regular object stores additional dynamic stats. All dynamic stats are observable for changes.

[orchid surge]

Usually the player would hold all their values directly as a list of components, you have systems running in the background that can manipulate those components and depending on your architecture the system changes things directly on your player or you fire an event and your player make the change themself

Ill make a broader example

[vale spear]

I for example have:

• SO stats on maxSpeed
• regular object on curSpeed
• controller listening to the InputManager and updating the curSpeed
• view updating the sprite on the screen by listening to changes on curSpeed

[orchid surge]

class Entity (Player)
  Component: Position
  Component: Velocity
  If event pattern: Event Listener: Position Change - [transform.position = Position]

class MovementSystem (Executed each frame)
  Collect: Get all entites with a Position and a Velocity > 0
  Execute: On all collected entites do [Position = Position + Velocity], also fire an event to the changed Entity that it has been changed
  If no event pattern: Change transform.position of all entities that were updated

That way you could reuse the movement system on lets say a monster

just slap a position + velocity on them

and they move

[vale spear]

In your example, don't you mix control (e.g., how to move the player) with visual (how to represent the updated position)?

[orchid surge]

You have a seperate InputSystem that would change the velocity

maybe on an entity that you filter out by having a component of "IsPlayer"

btw, Unity ECS uses no event pattern, atleast not built in

frameworks like Entitas have one built in

[vale spear]

what I have is:

• InputBroker: listening to inputManager and offering game-events such as movement
• controllers to listen on game event actions and changing the models (SOs + live stats objects)
• views to update the game

It just feels strange that my enemies have 14+ scripts layered onto them for the different controls and views

for example, I originally had a different MVC chain for 'rotation' and another for 'aswd' movement. but I combined them .

The reason is that not all entities can rotate, so it would have made sense to keep it separate.

[orchid surge]

in the case of ECS your inputbroker would just be a system that changes components on the entites you want, not much of a change

changing a model could be as easy as changing the "model" component on an entity and reacting to the event of it

[vale spear]

I need to look more into ECS to fully appreicate the difference to MVC. I coded 20 years of MVC and other standard patterns, so I'll need to do some research.

[orchid surge]

ECS is kind of a change of way from traditional programming, at first its confusing but as soon as you implement even small ECS patterns you will loose the confusion fast 😄

I use this atm: https://github.com/sschmid/Entitas

Its not as convoluted as DOTS/UnityECS but also not as performant

[vale spear]

does the wikipedia page do thECS justice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system

[orchid surge]

its very shallow but yes its a start 😄

[vale spear]

Great. will look into entitas. Thanks!!

[orchid surge]

Just be aware that while coding with entitas is easy, you need to run a 3rd party code generator

I am not fully sure how experienced you are but it might be worth a shot to start with the Unity solution

[vale spear]

Is there a good code template plugin for visual studio?

[orchid surge]

cause lets say you look for a job sometime in the future, nobody will know what entitas is 😄

oh i mean code generator, not templates

the event system behind entitas is auto-generated code

[vale spear]

I know. that's why I ask for code templates, not a type templates

[orchid surge]

i would have templates for jetbrains type IDEs

dont think they work in vs

[vale spear]

need to look for one.

[vale spear]

I'll not look for a job in the future, so it's ok 😄

[orchid surge]

Put that in the main directory of the project and replace the name of the DotSettings file with your project name

dont know if visual studio can work with it though

[vale spear]

Thanks. Will look for a VS code code template generator.

What I see (without audio) is that it is like tuple-space programming. You essentially create all these event tuples (=entities) and then some processor element consumes the tuples and updates the game state.

[orchid surge]

the entities (= mostly represented as gameobjects, but not required) would be the consumer and value (component) holder, the event pattern in ECS is not really part of base ecs