April 01, 2014

Minimalist Entity/Component System

I just uploaded a new addition to the minimalist code series. This time it's a minimalist version of an Entity/Component System. An ECS is a bit of a specialized architecture for modeling complex systems of dynamic objects. The origins for such systems come from the gaming world, but it has made its way into very different kinds of applications (the LightTable IDE is a great example here). If you're interested, the Entity Systems Wiki is a great resource for going deeper.

Javascript makes it really easy to set up such a system. In fact, the example I added is way more complex and took much longer to write than the actual engine itself. I was debating with myself whether or not to go for a more fluent API than what I provided now, but I was somewhat worried that I would be explaining the fluent part more than the actual ECS principles. If anyone is still interested in a more fluent version, though, let me know and I'll spend some time on that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice coffee shop example, thanks.

I have glued it together without node and/or requirejs here in case people want to run it in one click.