A short Introduction to ECS


What is Entiy Component System?

ECS is a architectural pattern used mostly in computer games that allows for a greater flexibility in categorizing entities in games (ex : player, enemy, weapon, etc.), and separating the data (the components) from the actual code(the system).
The data oriented design is repeatedly gaining ground in the game development industry over traditional OOP because it is more efficient, and if done right it scales better on bigger projects with bigger teams, meaning it's much easier to find bugs, increase performance or to add new systems late in the development process, or even after the game is released.
ECS and OOP are mutually exclusive. Some people may argue that elements of OOP can be integrate successfully into ECS paradigm, but the general consensus, and my observations so far is that if you really want profit from the ECS advantages you need to leave all the OOP techniques behind as combining them will not only make things murkier for you and potentially you colleagues (if you work in a team), but can also lead you to pitfalls that will break the ECS.
The pure ECS architectures gives you a clear separation between data and code, letting you optimize for performance and build more complex interactions.

What is an entity?

An entity is any non abstract in-game object, like a car, or a weapon, or a bullet, etc. Entities have no data and no methods attached to them, you can think of them more like tags.

What is a component?

A component is a data container. Any in-game object has multiple aspects to it , that define what it is and how it interacts with the world.
For example : the player might:
  • move with a certain speed - speedComponent
  • it is controlled by a player - inputComponent
  • be able to colide with other objects - rigidBodyComponent
  • have a position and a rotation - transformComponent
  • have animations - animationComponent
The OOP paradigm does not have concept of many aspects. The properties are hard coded into the class definition.
Sure you can use inheritance to define a enemy and then from that to define specific types of enemies, but you can't use properties from the player for example, witch in games can sometimes be very useful. For example: you take controll over an enemy (by adding to that enemy the input component).

What's a System?

A system provides the implementation of components, but it does it differently compared with the OOP witch would be that for each component to have it own methods that are then externally invoked.
The way that ECS handles it is to have continuously running systems that have they're own methods witch operate on components.
The differences is that in OOP theoretically if you have 100 units on the screen, each have they're own methods, where by in ECS you have an external system of methods that operate on the components (aka the data) of those units.

Unity's new focus on ECS!

Unity is already starting to implement the ECS model into they're engine and has big plans for it witch in conjunction with they're new job system that they're building should bring big improvements not only to the performance of future games, but also to the scalability of said games, bringing into focus a new era for building games from huge 3A titles to tiny messenger apps or web apps.
And that the most important part of why they're transitioning to the ECS system, because it will let them and us to modularize out code so only what's essential for our projects is include increasing performance in big games, and decreasing file size and loading times in small games.

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