ecs-0
The why and how of making an entity-component-system for personal use.
Parts
- Part 0
- Current page
- Part 1
- Understanding bevy's ECS implementation.
Introduction
I really liked working with bevy and the bevy ECS in rust; I was peering
through the code of the bevy_ecs and I realized it's actually very easy
to understand. I've been meaning to write my own ECS to develop skills that I
want, so I've decided to do a loose port to Zig, focusing almost entirely on
the entity storage and lookup sides for the moment.
But what is an ECS? To quote the bevy project:
ECS is a software pattern that involves breaking your program up into
Entities, Components, and Systems. Entities are unique things that are
assigned groups of Components, which are then processed using Systems.
Rationale
More than anything, I am curious to see how relying more on comptime than
traits will result in a different system. From my current, uninformed
perspective, I would think certain things will be easier, such as finding out
the access requirements of systems, and certain things could be harder, such as
adding constraints on what can and can't be a Component.
I am also curious as to how also how exposing control over memory allocation
would push things in a different direction; while bevy_ecs does implement
some custom data structures, memory allocators aren't really taken into
account. Trying out different memory allocators is something that I would like
to explore.
Overview
Our journey through understanding and implementing an ECS:
- Part 1: Bevy's Entities and Components
- A walkthrough of how Bevy ECS works, focused on how entities are stored and retrieved.
And more to come!