What is an entity system framework for game development?

Idea we played with was one step further--take the entities and have their components/state data backed as atoms, and create separate buffers. During update, read from buffer A and write state to buffer B, then swap. This should allow for fairly trivial use of a worker pool to handle concurrent updates.

What&#x27;s cool about this architecture is that it lets you define your game objects in terms of data, not code. You&#x27;re able to change your game objects at runtime.<p>I made a small C++&#x2F;QT implementation here:<p><a href="https://github.com/surjikal/cbgos-experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;surjikal&#x2F;cbgos-experiment</a><p>And here&#x27;s a screenshot of a game I built with it:<p><a href="https://raw.github.com/love-rollercoaster/space-game/master/assets/images/revenge-of-the-asteroid.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.github.com&#x2F;love-rollercoaster&#x2F;space-game&#x2F;master&#x2F;...</a><p>This is supposed to be an 3d asteroids clone, but the asteroid and spaceship graphics components were swapped. So you&#x27;re controlling an asteroid, and your goal is to destroy spaceships.

Interesting to see the evolution from the original game loop to the final system, kind of reminded me of these drawings &quot;from ape to modern homo sapiens&quot;. One thing that bothers me with the final result, though, is that you end with a system where you can&#x27;t tell the difference between two kinds of entities. If in your system infantry can climb aboard a spaceship but not the reverse, you can&#x27;t guarantee that statically, unless you have a separate layer for this kind of logic.

This[1] is a pretty good resource on ES.<p>1 <a href="http://entity-systems.wikidot.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;entity-systems.wikidot.com&#x2F;</a>

This is interesting, reading some of the linked documents, my naive generalization is that it pushes the entities into using things like maps and dictionaries instead of static properties. The &quot;system manager&quot; stuff just pulls things out of the maps and feeds them to functions to do work, so it is very much &#x27;data-driven&#x27; and I must assume more work is put into &quot;configuration&quot; of the entities, just like a data-driven business process requires &quot;configuration&quot; of the order processing pipeline.<p>i.e. Can some of the complexity of a &#x27;true&#x27; entity component system by simply reduced to favoring dictionaries and maps instead of static properties?

What would be an ES-friendly way of modeling relationships between entities? It&#x27;s hard to give up the speed of pointers in say C++ and use instead handles for example (tho they would come with other advantages like lifecycle handling).

I&#x27;ve always wondered if this idea was usable in general purpose application programming. It is very similar to DCI.