ECS - Entity Component System

Build your own Game-Engine based on the Entity Component System concept in Golang

The architectural pattern of an ECS is mostly used in game development, to provide long-term maintainability and extendability of large, dynamic systems.

An Entity is basically a composition of different components and has an ID.
A Component contains only the state or data of one specific aspect like health, position, velocity etc.
A System handles the behaviour or logic of the components. A movement system uses the position and velocity to implement an entities movement.

• Goals
• Installation
• Steps to start
• I want more than 64 Components !

Goals

• Provide an easy-to-use framework to build a game engine from scratch.
• No dependencies to other modules or specific game libraries - Feel free to use what fits your needs.
• Minimum overhead - use only what is really needed.
• Plugins to offer unlimited room for improvements.

Installation

From Source

go get -u github.com/andygeiss/ecs

Steps to start

The first step is to be clear about what we want our game engine to do. The main task is to make sure that we have combined all the essential components that are responsible for the technical and logical aspects.

An Entity Component System (ECS) helps us to do this because the logical components (data) such as entities and their components can be separated from the actual logic. Among other things, this has the advantage that we can implement and test the game mechanics independently from the rest.

So let's start...

We decide to use 2D and define the three most important components:

• Position
• Size
• Velocity

In the next step, the three most important systems implement:

• Collision
• Movement
• Rendering

I want more than 64 Components !

Yes! You can do that by adding a Name() function to your component and using FilterByNames instead of FilterByMask. However if you want the fastest possible solution you need to know that FilterByNames is 40 times slower than FilterByMask. This will maybe not impact your Game if there are only a few thousands of entities. ;-)