Apr 7Building Games in ECS with Entity RelationshipsBehavior in games is in many ways defined by the interaction between entities. …Game Development12 min read
Feb 19, 2021ECS: From Tool to ParadigmThis blog is about Entity Component Systems. If you’d like to learn more about ECS, see this FAQ: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq I usually shy away from the “P word” in conversations about ECS. Whenever it is uttered all it seems to do is divide people into two camps, which is rarely a…Games12 min read
Jan 22, 2021Flecs v2.3 (and v2.2) is out!I blog-skipped v2.2, so there’s a lot to catch up on :-) First of all, Flecs is an Entity Component System (ECS). If you don’t know what an ECS is, check out the FAQ. Much has happened since the last update, and not all of it in code! The Flecs…Game Development7 min read
Oct 16, 2020Deconstructing Flecs PrefabsOne of the key design goals of Flecs is to enable reusability. When we talk about reusability, it is often the reusability of code. While that is a big part of it, reusability of data is just as important, especially in games. …Games10 min read
Sep 1, 2020Flecs 2.1 is out!It has only been one month since version 2.0 came out, and yet Flecs 2.1 has lots of improvements that makes building games with C and C++ easier than ever! Let’s go over some of the new developments, starting with: Flecs Hub This is not strictly part of the Flecs core, but…Game Development5 min read
Aug 11, 2020Why Storing State Machines in ECS is a bad idea.Disclaimer: I am the author of Flecs, a C/C++ Entity Component System. If you’d like to know more about ECS, see this FAQ. If you are using an ECS (Entity Component System) for the development of a game, chances are that at some point you had to ask yourself whether…Games11 min read
Aug 3, 2020Flecs 2.0 is out!Link to the Flecs Discord. Link to the repository. After having been in development for almost a year, Flecs 2.0, an Entity Component System for C and C++ is finally out! This release is almost a complete revamp of the internal data structures, and comes with many new features that…Game Development5 min read
Jul 22, 2020Making the most of ECS identifiersThe previous version of the blog was hopelessly outdated! I rewrote it to include all of the latest tips & tricks. If you are writing your own ECS framework (or are about to), there is a good chance you are designing your entities as unique integer values. One of the…Games11 min read
Jul 9, 2020Why Vanilla ECS Is Not EnoughDisclaimer: I am the author of Flecs, an Entity Component System for C99. Discord: https://discord.gg/ZSSyqty When I started writing my first ECS a year ago, I was excited. It seemed to do something unique by offering more flexibility and performance to a developer at the same time. …Games11 min read
Mar 14, 2020Building an ECS #2: Archetypes and VectorizationFlecs Discord: https://discord.gg/MRSAZqb This is the second in a series of posts about the guts of Flecs, an Entity Component System for C and C++. …Software Development10 min read
