Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
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Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#2Reminds me of how, for a very long time, almost every effect in league of legends was invisible minion(s) under the hood: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#3the more interesting article is linked in the first paragraph, where spectral kittens power radio stations in Fallout 4
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#4I think the prevalence of these sorts of issues is why ECS is such an appealing architecture in game design. OOP seems to always devolve. A new feature is needed for the game, the feature breaks some well established design rule, it's challenging/slow to refactor everything to make sense while considering the new feature, and so a kludge is implemented where existing objects are forced to be more flexible than planned.
Of course, this can happen with ECS, too, but it feels easier to avoid. Systems which are coupled to individual components of entities, rather than whole objects, provide an extreme degree of flexibility as long as the components stay small.
(bonus: another example of this occurring in Fallout 3 - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout...)
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#5Reminds me of how, for a very long time, almost every effect in league of legends was invisible minion(s) under the hood: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt
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Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#6This always became really interesting to see when you had a private server and could view invisible NPCs.
The “bunnies” usually used the default infernal NPC graphic
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#7I think the prevalence of these sorts of issues is why ECS is such an appealing architecture in game design. OOP seems to always devolve. A new feature is needed for the game, the feature breaks some well established design rule, it's challenging/slow to refactor everything to make sense while considering the new feature, and so a kludge is implemented where existing objects are forced to be more flexible than planne…
ECS is IMHO a logical consequence of observing that game worlds are not object oriented (as it is taught in schools, so class hierarchies etc.) Add a sprinkle of performance requirements and you get what is understood as ECS frameworks.
…but it turns out that the ‘world is not made of class hierarchies’ observation is not limited to games, hence Rust’s and go’s approaches to OOP: ditch inheritance at the language level.
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#8Building custom maps in WarCraft3 also involved a lot of invisible units to create unique spells. Creators generally used toads or sheep for these effects.
I've created a custom map turning the system a round, where you played the invisible critters instead of the hero :D
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#9Can anyone point to a better source for this so I can't share it with people? Kotaku is the TMZ of gaming and I never share it, but underlying content is good on this article.
Re: Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
#10I think the prevalence of these sorts of issues is why ECS is such an appealing architecture in game design. OOP seems to always devolve. A new feature is needed for the game, the feature breaks some well established design rule, it's challenging/slow to refactor everything to make sense while considering the new feature, and so a kludge is implemented where existing objects are forced to be more flexible than planne…
I had to look that up. From Wikipedia: Entity component system (ECS) is a software architectural pattern mostly used in video game development for the representation of game world objects. An ECS comprises entities composed from components of data, with systems which operate on entities' components.
ECS follows the principle of composition over inheritance, meaning that every entity is defined not by a type hierarchy, but by the components that are associated with it. Systems act globally over all entities which have the required components.