My recent work involving EnTT is still under NDA, though at least one of the projects should have a public announcement sometime next year.
With that said, if there is interest, I'd enjoy building a clean room compiler for an existing language using EnTT and other techniques I've developed over the years. Thoughts? While I absolutely adore TinyCC, it might be worthwhile giving that space another go?
Well, I don't think I've enough skills on this and I'd follow the project eagerly to learn something new, so I'd go with what you feel confident and/or you like!
My thoughts are that such a project would be of interest for tons of people though, I'd willingly share it as much as possible. :)
The design is such that you pay for what you need. To do what you're looking for, that is, a linear access on multiple components without jumps nor anything else, there exist groups. They are the fastest thing you can imagine because you iterate literally N arrays for N components in order with no jumps nor branches. They affect performance on creation/destruction though, in order to speed up quite a lot linear accesses.
Also, views are such that it doesn't worth it creating a group when one of the components involved in a query is assigned to few entities, since the view internally uses the shortest pool.
And so on, there are tons of details and use cases. The documentation (the wiki, not the README) contains all the details but it's pretty big and takes a while to go through all them.
The fact is that a real world software isn't made only of linear accesses, so the whole library is meant to allow optimizing the given access pattern when needed.
Feel free to ask if I triggered you and you want more details. ;)
Reach me out here, on gitter, discord, by mail, whatever...
With this post I wanted to go into details on the grouping functionalities that can be implemented with sparse sets. This is something I have been asked about since I published the last part of the series and I think it can help to better understand how EnTT works under the hood.
My thoughts on a possible implementation made on top of the registry, waiting to find the right way to offer them as a built-in feature. Feedback or suggestions for alternative solutions are welcome.
Stay tuned then. I was already planning to write something about scene graphs and component-based models. Nothing forbids to write also about the rest.
I saw the video, but they don't go much in details on the actual implementation, so it's hard to say where, how and if things are optimized or not. Moreover, the speaker stresses also on the fact that ECS is used for code organization in most cases and they benefit a lot on this aspect.
Good point. I put it in wrong wording probably. I didn't want to say that it's a shitty thing, just let the reader know that it's not a great improvement in terms of performance. However, I point out also how the halfway approach already is worth it and brings in some benefits, the same you nicely described in your comments. ;-)
Maybe. However it makes sense to stick with the paradigm with which you are more comfortable. There is no shame with using OOP instead of component-based models or the other way around. I think that knowing both of them can help sometimes, because they fit different problems and can work side-by-side tho.
That said, if you'll ever write such an article, ping me!! I'm pretty sure it will be an interesting point of view to think of.
My goal is exactly to give details on how to implement different component-based models from easier ones up to hardest ones to develop and provide links to real-world implementations. In the last part, I'd like to go in depth into one or two of them, but I'm doing all of this in my free time, so it will take a while to publish everything. I hope you'll stay tuned and keep reading, because feedback like these ones are invaluable.
