I lived in a perfect OOP bubble for my entire life. Everything was peaceful and it worked perfectly. When I wanted to move that player, I do player.move(10.0, 0.0); When I want to collect a coin, I go GameMan -> collect_coin(); And when I really need a global method, so be it. I love my C++, I love my python and yes, I also love my GDScript (Godot Game Engine). They all work with classes and objects and it all works perfectly for me.
But oh no! I wanted to learn Rust recently and I really liked how values are non-mutable by defualt and such, but it doesn’t have classes!? What’s going on? How do you even move a player? Do you just HAVE to have a global method for everything? like move_player(); rotate_player(); player_collect_coin(); But no! Even worse! How do you even know which player is meant? Do you just HAVE to pass the player (which is a struct probably) like this? move(player); rotate(player); collect_coin(player, coin); I do not want to live in a world where everything has to be global! I want my data to be organized and to be able to call my methods WHERE I need them, not where they just lie there, waiting to be used in the global scope.
So please, dear C, Rust and… other non OOP language users! Tell me, what makes you stay with these languages? And what is that coding style even called? Is that the “pure functional style” I heard about some time?
Also what text editor do you use (non judgemental)? Vim user here
Yes ECS is probably the most popular scalable DOD programming pattern, aside from Compute Shaders. If correctly used, ECS store your data in a way that makes access more cache friendly. There are multiple flavours of ECS with some which are better for small components and access and others which are tuned for insert and delete.
One thing I would say if you want to switch to ECS is to start with a simple performance test of say 100, 10 000 and 1 million entities being updated in a loop. Do this with and without ECS. This way you can keep track of performance and have actual numbers instead of trusting the magic of ECS. ECS can have some overhead and aren’t always the best choice and if you use them wrong they won’t be as good.
I haven’t tried Bevy yet but it looks very promising!