Seba's Lab

Introduction This long-due article will conclude the series on Entity Component System Code Design and will explore the idea of Inversion of Control layers applied to ECS. I design code in terms of layers for quite some time now and, in fact, I have hinted at it several times in

There are several reasons why programmers have a hard time wrapping their heads around ECS concepts. Having learned to code with an OOP-centric language is one of them as ECS reasonings are often at the antipodes of the OOP ones.Being Object-Oriented Programming so popular means that it is not simple

Premise In this article, I am going to explain why I believe the Entity Component System design is a great paradigm to develop simpler to maintain (and therefore less expensive) codebases and also explore the idea to formalise best practices through the application of the SOLID principles, which, at glance,

Entity Component System design to achieve true Inversion of Flow Control

The Dependency Inversion Principle is part of the SOLID principles. If you want a formal definition of DIP, please read the articles written by Martin[1] and Schuchert[2]. This is the most difficult principle to get right. I will take a step back from the previous article I wrote and discuss

In this article, I will explain the previously introduced Inversion of Flow control, then I will illustrate how to apply it in OOP and how this can be best achieved using the Entity Component System design. While ECS design apparently seems to have nothing to do with Inversion Of Control,

If you got here from my previous articles, you may have still many questions unanswered, with one possibly being: why is an IoC container called Inversion Of Control Container? The first answer is: because someone chose historically a bad name[1]. The serious answer is: IoC containers take away the responsibility

There is a wicked truth behind the use of an Inversion of Control container, an unspoken programming tragedy that takes place every day. Firm in my intentions to understand better the severe consequences of using an IoC container in game development, I decided to write this series of articles that

Note: this article explains the use of Svelto.IoC container in more detail. However, I deprecated it a long time ago, so read this article for knowledge, but know that I now don’t recommend using an IoC container in any project. In my previous article, I briefly introduced the problems related

Unity is a good game development tool and honestly, I like most of its features. However, the programming framework is awkward to use on big projects where code maintainability is of fundamental importance. As you may have guessed, the following considerations in this article do not apply to simple projects

Introduction My Xmas gift to the Svelto Community this year was the complete rewrite of the Survival Svelto.ECS MiniExample. This example is used as a reference by all newcomers because it’s the simplest to digest for people who are not in the ECS mentality and still think in terms of

among many other features, Svelto.ECS 3.3 introduces a new shiny and finally usable filters API. The previous one had the bad habit to get very awkward very fast with the growth of complexity. The new API learns from the previous mistakes and introduces a ton of sweet features. To recap

Introduction This long-due article will conclude the series on Entity Component System Code Design and will explore the idea of Inversion of Control layers applied to ECS. I design code in terms of layers for quite some time now and, in fact, I have hinted at it several times in

Let’s run Svelto.ECS on Stride Engine and have some fun with it!

Svelto.ECS 3.0 is officially out, let’s find out what’s new.

Previously, in Svelto.ECS, it was possible to query entity components directly as a managed array, which would have resulted in the fastest way to iterate over the components in c#. Since Svelto.ECS 3.0 and because now the framework supports natively native memory as well, I decided to remove this possibility

With the approaching third major release, Svelto.ECS internals have been overhauled to support Burst and native memory (among other features that I will discuss in different articles). The idea to support native memory in a c# framework is counter intuitive, but Burst is such an incredible piece of technology that

I had two interesting problems to solve during the development of Svelto.ECS, which in short are: Set an implemented property of a struct, but only when the struct implements a specific interface, from a generic method and without casting the struct to the interface Assign an object to a field

The Unity Package Manager is a good effort from Unity to distribute project dependencies similarly to what NPM does. UPM is still in its infancy and some problems are to be addressed, among them the conflicts arising from common .net dll is the problem that annoys me the most. Currently,

Being busy on multiple fronts, I recently went AWOL from this blog, but Svelto is keeping up well with the new technologies (read Unity DOTS) and we are actively developing it for our new game Gamecraft. I am also spending my little spare time to develop Svelto 3.0, which will

2022 Update I leave this article up for historical purposes, but almost everything written here is not recommended anymore. The publisher/consumer tool especially was designed to let separate EnginesRoots communicate with each other in a thread-safe way. Any other use of it is confirmed to be an abuse, including the

Welcome back! It’s some time that Svelto ECS 2.8 is actually ready, as it has been used at Freejam for quite a while now (yep, we are developing Robocraft Experiments with it) and as the list of tasks for SECS 2.9 is growing, it was time to write this article

Note: this article is now outdated. The new version is found at: https://www.sebaslab.com/the-new-svelto-ecs-survival-mini-example/ Introduction Lately I have been discussing Svelto.ECS extensively with several, more or less experienced, programmers. I gathered a lot of feedback and took a lot of notes that I will be using as starting point for my

Note: this article is not maintained. The mini example Doofuses has a third and final iteration for a long time now and it is what all my new articles refer to when talking about this example. Iteration 3 enhances the code using Burst and Jobs. After finishing writing my previous

can Svelto.ECS be used with UnityECS? Is the Unity Job system really better than Svelto.Tasks? Let’s see it.

Svelto ECS 2.7 is out, let’s see what’s new: Exclusive Groups, new SwapEntityGroup and RemoveEntity and new Sequencer.

Svelto ECS so far… Svelto.ECS wasn’t born just from the needs of a large team, but also as result of years of reasoning behind software engineering applied to game development(*). Compared to Unity.ECS the main goals and reasons for Svelto.ECS to exist are different enough to justify its on going development (plus Svelto is

[11/03/2018] : added Unity Jobs System version and updated timings. Please check at the end of the article. With my previous article on Svelto.Tasks and multi-threaded cache friendly code, I failed to show visually the power of Svelto.Tasks because I didn’t know how to upload a huge amount of data

Note: this is an article dedicated to the windows platform. What am I going to show may or may not apply to other platforms. Those pesky native crashes If you are a long term unity developer, it must have happened to you: Unity suddenly closes itself and shows the dreaded

For the game I am currently developing, Gamecraft, we are using Svelto.ECS for the game logic, Unity ECS for the physic and GPUInstancer compute shader pipeline for the rendering. I have never had the time to benchmark the UECS rendering pipeline against the GPUInstancer one, mainly because I decided directly

A recent tweet asking about how to achieve zero allocation code in Unity inspired me to write a short piece about the importance of memory allocation in c# and game development. C# wasn’t initially designed for game development, but today, thanks to Unity, ECS and Burst, we can achieve great

Finally I found the time to play with unmanaged arrays and Memory<T>/Span<T>. In order to investigate possible improvements of the data structures used by Svelto.ECS, I wanted to know what the fastest way to set elements in a preallocated array could be. Using the very powerful BenchmarkDotNet and with the

For a long time I wanted to make some experiments with Photon Network Engine at home. During my professional experience, I worked on several multiplayer games, therefore I was pretty curious about it. Exit Games provides two versions of Photon Network Engine: the traditional Photon Server edition and the new Photon Cloud

knowing how short my memory is, I saved all my professional life memories in a folder on my HD. Some of those memories are meaningful only to me, but why not sharing my first, completed game (yeahh it was 1997…I think) ? The version I am linking is actually the