Half-OT: Anyone tried to apply ECS in a different context than games?
I’m sure there are some use cases where it makes sense, but I’ve yet to encounter situations where I want the flexibility to compose entities out of data-components (ie entities have a lot of variety, most non-games I’ve worked on, entities tend to be one of a handful preset types), need to operate on subsets of entity data in bulk (systems) and can also tolerate in-memory (lack of transactional persistence). Eg if I need to treat data in bulk, say time series, it tends to be a subset of the data and each entry is more or less uniform (no need to compose out of components), or I need transactional guarantees.
So while I’m sure there are cases where it’s useful outside of games, I feel that almost always a dull blown database us preferable (and even in games I’d say that a relational database would probably be preferable, from a data modelling point of view, if performance weren’t a concern)
I’d love to hear from anyone who has used ECS outside of games, though!
This.
When I try to explain ECS.. or just "data oriented" I often say it is like creating a well defined database. Most developers have experience in SQL one way or another.
> I’d love to hear from anyone who has used ECS outside of games, though!
I am a C# programmer. I am also the Lead Developer. While C# is, by default, an OOP language.. I try to limit on inheritence and/or overrides. Point is I try not to go hard on OOP ways of doing things, and seperate logic into their own libraries.
How is this ECS? The truth is, directly.. it isn't. However, I try to encourage seperation of data and logic. You could say this mindset shares a lot with ECS.
One time -- a few years ago now, where I implemented "ECS like" solution was adding a (free version of) google maps onto our web page. My boss was "but the map might do this" or "but how can the map do that?"
"How can we do that?"
and my answer was components! Nobody really understood what I meant so I chucked an example together and they liked it.
Add the map (the entity) and tell it what components you want. Want to add pins = Component. Want to be able add a circle (point with radius) = Component. Want to create polygons = Component.
The System element would update the components.
Not comparable directly to games, but its an example of ECS outside of it.
Looking back and knowing what I know now (having written a basic ECS mechanism for learning), I think ECS would work well as a guiding pattern. There's basically a fixed number of entities and components, and the systems are not hugely complex. Wire it up with a data input layer and a graphical output layer, and it would be a great fit.