benefits

Benefits of ECS/odb

• Composition over inheritance
  • Mix-and match individual parts.
  • Avoids long chain of dependence.
• Data driven
  • less engineers required.
  • Runtime composition.
  • Separation between data and logic.
  • Suits serialization and editors..
• ECS paradigm helps:
  • Brevity
  • Readability
  • Clear definition of purpose.
  • Extensibility
  • Maintainability
• Performance (ODB)
  • Optimal use of CPU cache.
  • Various tricks for better performance.
  • Cheap to find all entities matching a certain composition.
• Other benefits
  • Modular: helps testing, debugging, profiling.
  • Lifecycle management.
  • Agile; suits iterative development.
  • Emergent scope (indie games, game jams!)

Disadvantages of ECS

• Big paradigm shift
  • Easy to learn, hard to master.
• Analysis paralysis!
  • Architecture requires more thought.
  • Not always clear which problems it can and cannot solve.
  • Tricky to pick the right level of abstraction and encapsulation for your design.
  • Risk of chasing your tail a lot.
• Engine dependence
  • Hard to decouple ECS from systems to get pure unit tests,
  • Framework gotcha’s.
• Level of abstraction
  • Data driven approach can obscure flow of execution.
  • Couples tightly with lifecycle.