Comment by setr
3 months ago
ECS is basically the realization that relational databases are a pretty damn good model.
I’m suspicious though that you could probably get away with literally just using like an in-memory duckdb to store your game state and get most of the performance/modeling value while also getting a more powerful/robust query engine — especially for like turn-based games. I’m also not sure that bevy’s encoding of queries into the type system is all that sane — as opposed to something like query building with LINQ, but I think it’s how they get to resolve the system dependency graph for parallelization
> ECS is basically the realization that relational databases are a pretty damn good model.
A pretty darn good model for what though and to what extent? For processing millions of objects, sure. For gameplay logic, using ECS for everything? I don't know about that. What I was implying with my comment is that ergonomics are the most important trait of a good game engine.
I reach for an ECS as a last resort when the performance of a gameplay system demands it, not before. Even before that I will tweak my gameplay code to be less wasteful.