Tag: ecs

Full disclosure, I worked on specs. I’m biased. Specs has evolved quite a bit since I last worked on it years ago, there are some very talented developers who were willing to put in the hard work to improve it. Today it is a better library than it was when I stopped working on it. The developers have done a wonderful job of improving it.

Still, ideas evolve, and there are always different approaches that perform better or worse. Have different ergonomic etc. Legion is one of the ECS that has come onto my attention as it is the planned replacement for specs in the the Amethyst project. It has been a huge project to try and port the code-base over to it, and it is still not complete.

I’ve heard from a few people who are just getting started with entity component systems (ECS) that implementing logic for a turn-based game seems more complicated than it should be. I thought that seemed odd, but I just recently ran into this problem myself. While certainly not insurmountable, implementing turn-based logic in an ECS just doesn’t feel great. I think the reason is that no one likes to implement a loop via distributed state machines.

It's been about 6 months since I watched Catherine West's excellent Using Rust for Game Development sent me down the Entity-Component-System (ECS) rabbit hole, and I thought I'd share some of my findings.

I've been meaning to write about this for quite a while now but it took a while to put my thoughts into a cohesive article without throwing massive walls of code at you.