Building a turn-based game prototype using ECS - Unite Copenhagen 

I was waiting for something like this. Thank you so much.

simple and clearly

I prefer having something like an 'enum component' and just using that in a predicate compared to using different 'tag components' - but only if I know I will add/remove them often, though.

If course there can be better patterns. But what's important it's getting used to syntax and component system interplay. Using a simply and generic tag way ear the best explanation they could do for basically every type of game out there . It isn't near bthe best performance one could get with ECS but for getting the 5to20x increase it works. Specially in complex systems the way tags simplify and quick to implement is very a very good pattern. What I don't like it's that he trashed his talk just because he was probably mad about not being informed beforehand or some minor change to ECS.

Does anybody have a link for the keynote he is often mentioning?

where is the project??

any chance to get this project?

The biggest issue I have with this tutorial is that they are showcasing how ComponentSystem works, considering they are not multithreaded. It would be nice to see more examples of multithreading :(

I don't think ADD/REMOVE flag is a food way for the turn-based game. You will need a lot of flags when developing the full game, and add/remove these flags will become a disaster.

Stardew valley!!

That pattern at the end smells horrific. ECS sort of works by assigning a type system to entities based on what components they possess, and then applying systems based on 'type'. Data can be organised based on type, which determines what it can do. It is an optimisation because typically there are many objects of the most important types, and types rarely change. If the data was well organised for the systems in one frame, and none of changes type, it will still be well organised. The overhead involved in keeping the data organised is worth it because it is reused repeatedly. What you do by using components as flags that change regularly is throw all that out. The memory management has to reassign and reorganise every single entity. Hopefully it will be smart enough to realise that it doesn't have to do any reorganisation of the component data, but the overhead in even checking that is non trivial. ECS can be thought of as semi-dynamic typing. It combines the performance of static typing with the flexibility of dynamic typing, and leverages the fact that casts are usually rare (enemy loses the alive component, for example). Behind the scenes you have an optimised static type system managed to look dynamic. Adding and removing components is ECS's getComponent… It is an extremely powerful tool, and fantastic for when it is needed, but should not be on the hot path.

the git hub files are nothing like what you started with!

I mean I would... but even with a blank project, importing the DOTS stack causes infinite import loops and missing DLLs.

"sort of works most of the time"... um excuse me??

I kind of dislike the whole idea to attach flags and empty components as tags to distinguish the entities from each other and to query them. I am sure there should be a better design pattern to work with ECS.

Interesting to watch 2y later… nothing has changed, there are no “new things” that use ecs… and ecs is still largely ‘slow cooking’ somewhere in the kitchen ….

Top da balada

The ActorComponent example he shows is completely wrong. Breaks the component approach. You don't mix position data and target position, these are 2 separate things.

Even if the code would be changed in the future.. he should'nt have 'brushed' it over really it smells like he didn't made the presentation and just found a perfect excuse to not having to explain it. There's really good code there. Such a waste of opportunity.

i c no benefits with using ecs in turn based games

You should create a ComponentSystemGroup and update IT instead of every system manually. This prototype has bad practices written all over it... Can't believe Unity couldn't find someone who actually knows programming principles to do this presentation.

Composition vs inheritance is completely irrelevant to the ECS topic since GameObjects already encourage composition. There's no inheritence involved unless you mess up your MonoBehavior design.

First

This is obviously not the right way to use ECS. Specially when very simple OOP can do the job faster and better. You want to use ECS when you need large amounts of simulations. OOP mentality is clearly not the problem. Use the right tool for the right job. Btw, this ECS idea is nothing new, this have been around for decades. Relational databases queries, anyone?