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jeremycw | 4 years ago

> Doesn't the former enable the latter?

Not necessarily. ECS is a local maxima when developing a general purpose game engine. Since it's general purpose it can do nothing more than provide a lowest common denominator interface that can be used to make any game. If you are building a game from scratch why would you limit yourself to a lowest common denominator interface when there's no need? Just write the exact concrete code that needs to be there to solve the problem.

> Our job as engineers is to make software that functions according to some set of desires, and those desires may directly conflict with approaching an optimal transform.

All runtime desires of the software must be encoded in the transform. So no software functionality should get in the way of approaching the optimal transform. What does get in the way of approaching the optimal transform is code organization, architecture and abstraction that is non-essential to performing the transform.

discuss

order

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B|4 years ago

> Just write the exact concrete code that needs to be there to solve the problem.

Good luck with that when the exact code to solve the problem is not the exact code the next week, because the problem has changed or evolved.

Not to suggest an ECS is the answer, but this line of thinking is reductive to the realities of creating a piece of art. It's not a spec you can draw a diagram for and trust will be basically the same. It's a creature you discover, revealing more of itself over time. The popularity of the ECS is because it provides accessible composition. It's not the only way of composing data but being able to say "AddX", "RemoveX" without the implementation details of what struct holds what data and what groupings might matter is what makes it appealing.

meheleventyone|4 years ago

I think there’s two orthogonal things being conflated by you. Flexibility of a solution and how general the solution is.

What you’re basically saying is a solution should be flexible to change because making a game requires trial and error. I totally agree with that.

Using a general solution is one path to flexibility but it does come with a cost associated. It’s flexibility built on a tower of complexity and if you look at a modern ECS implementation that is performant it’s actually quite a lot of complexity. You’re also reducing flexibility in the sense that these sort of solutions generally have preferred patterns you need to fit your game design into. So you end up introducing a learning, maintainance and conceptual burden into the project you might not need.

OTOH if you have a specific problem you can write a specific solution for you will end up with less code, hopefully in a conceptually coherent form. That in itself offers flexibility. Simple code you can easily replace is often more flexible than complex code you need to coax into a new form.

The key is to recognise whether your problem is specific or general you need flexibility.

These architectural patterns are fun to argue over and obsessed over by armchair game developers but are a trap if you’re trying to make a game rather than a general purpose game engine.

Which isn’t to say you don’t want some framework underlying things for all sorts of mundane reasons. But most games could get away with that being an entity type that gets specialised rather than anything more complex.

BobbyJo|4 years ago

> If you are building a game from scratch why would you limit yourself to a lowest common denominator interface when there's no need?

There is a need: the limits of the human mind. Nobody can model an entire (worthwhile) game in their head, so unless you plan on recursively rewriting the entire program as each new new oversight pops up, you aren't going to get anywhere near optimal anyway.

debaserab2|4 years ago

> If you are building a game from scratch why would you limit yourself to a lowest common denominator interface when there's no need? Just write the exact concrete code that needs to be there to solve the problem.

Coming from the realm of someone who has mostly swam in the OO pool their career, I struggle understanding how a concrete implementation of something like a video game wouldn't spiral out of control quickly without significant organization and some amount of abstraction overhead. That said, I have found ECS type systems be so general purpose that you end up doing a lot of things to please the ECS design itself than you do focusing on the implementation.

Do you have any examples of games and/or code that are written in more of a data oriented way? I'd really love to learn more about this approach.

jeremycw|4 years ago

While stylistically I don't necessarily agree with him all the time, Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero (https://handmadehero.org/) is probably the most complete resource in terms of videos and access to source code as far as an 'example' goes.