ECS

Dynec uses concepts from the ECS (Entity-Component-System) paradigm. It is a data-oriented programming approach that consists of three core concepts:

• An entity represent different objects.
• Different components store data for an entity.
• Systems process the components to execute game logic.

Data

An intuitive way to visualize entities and components would be a table, where each row is an entity and each cell is a component of that entity:

Everything can be an entity! For example, in a shooters game, each player is an entity, each bullet is an entity, and even each inventory slot of the player may be an entity as well.

The components for a bullet are different from those for a player:

Logic

A system is a function that processes the data. In a typical simulation program, each system is executed once per "cycle" (a.k.a. "ticks") in a main loop. Usually, systems are implemented as loops that execute over all entities of a type:

for each bullet entity {
    location[bullet] += speed[bullet]
}

An ECS framework schedules systems to run on different threads. Therefore, programs written with ECS are almost lock-free.