[SeanBoocock]

All of what you describe in terms of data driven entity composition is possible without a true ECS framework. That is what I was referring to and more or less what Unreal or Unity (base, not dots) offer.

ECS is one of the better examples of something that sounds good on paper but in practice, and crucially in production, doesn’t provide the sort of benefits that outweigh the friction it imposes.

There seems to be a myopia online around things like ECS, data oriented programming generally, writing games in C (as opposed to that horrible high level monstrosity C++…), optimization, etc. Those are all fine things in and of themselves (though I’ve never understood the opposition to C++ as anything other than nostalgia), but they are often discussed without being ground in the considerations of building a game. If you want to build a tech demo, great! However, the needs of building a game with hundreds of people, most of whom aren’t engineers, and to a quality/production level that even “simple” things become complicated, demand other things take precedence. I lead a team that facilitates a creative project, not to satisfy my technical desire to have optimal cache or thread utilization in every piece of code. The right tool is the one that gets you closer to the creative goal, and for gameplay code most of the time it probably looks like what Epic or Unity are shipping with their entity frameworks.