Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play

Post by dgb23 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #20

cardanome wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECS is for me the natural way to design games. I wouldn't even know to design them any other way. I started game dev with love2d which is a pretty minimalist framework. When I participated in a game jam, I needed a very flexible system that would allow for quick prototyping and would handle many different entities. I ended up writing something which I later realized would be an ECS system. It worked great and I would…

ECS and OOP are sides of the same coin, although apparently it is only visible to those that read SIGPLAN papers. "Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming" https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Clemens-Szyperski/dp/0201745720 One of the first publications on the matter.

Post by codetrotter » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #38

halvnykterist wrote: post #3

I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…

ECS is entrenched in rogue development in general, at least going by r/roguelikedev. It (or at least a component architecture, if not fully blown ECS) seems to be a good fit since these style of games tend to have a lot of composition (in items, effects, behaviour). Personally, while my experience is a bit limited, I quite like the ECS style. It just makes logical sense to me as a way of composing entities from diffe…

Post by TylerE » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

thebracket wrote: post #16

myth_drannon wrote: post #15

It's a great book but I struggled with an additional overhead of ECS library usage. Don't know if it would have been better just roll out it's own simple logic for ECS , but then it would probably double the length of the book.

Page count was a real concern. I wanted to introduce Rust newcomers to easy concurrency, and keep the data-storage side of things manageable (storing a big list of dynamic objects with traits gets messy fast and leads to a lot more borrow-checker fighting). Using an ECS let me dodge the latter bullet, at the expense of a bit of complexity. (I made sure Flappy didn't need an ECS) Bevy didn't exist when I started writi…

Post by MaulingMonkey » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

halvnykterist wrote: post #17

thebracket wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here) Bob makes some good points, so I'd like to share my $0.02 on the ECS debate. The posters below who point out that a lot of Rust setups use ECS to avoid mutability issues are correct (although internally Bevy is an ECS that maps its own node graph) - and that certainly helps - but it's not the whole picture. I think it's important to separate the EC from the S in ECS. Entity-Component storage is basicall…

> Composition over inheritance (especially in Rust, which doesn't really have inheritance - although you can fake it with traits) This does not require ECS, you can happily have something like struct Entity { components: Vec >, } (Nor do I think this is a good way of setting up a traditional roguelike) > Replication; if you want to replicate state across multiple nodes, a good ECS can really help you I'm not sure wha…

    struct Entity {
        components: Vec>,
    }

    struct Entity {
        pub position: Option,
        pub sprite:   Option,
        pub scripts:  Vec,
        //...
    }
    
    fn render_world(entities: &[Entity]) {
        for entity in entities {
            if let Entity { position: Some(xy), sprite: Some(sprite), .. } = entity {
                // ...
            }
        }
    }

Post by jyriand » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

halvnykterist wrote: post #3

I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…