Re: Guile Game Library

[David Thompson]

On 05/30/2013 06:07 AM, Javier Sancho wrote:
> In my view, playing with entities gives two ways for doing things in a 
> game. Game designers work with "objects" that have components that 
> have properties, i.e., it's possible to create a ship with a position 
> and a velocity. And game programmers work with data (or functions) 
> which are passed to a system (function) that returns data (or 
> functions), so these systems can be treated separately, can be running 
> in another processor, etc. But it's my opinion. What problems have you 
> encountered using entity systems?

I haven't tried implementing an entity-component system in Scheme, but 
in the past I've tried to grok writings on the subject and wrote an 
implementation in C++ and later in Python. The Python version worked 
much better than the C++ version, since Python is more dynamic. I like 
components in theory as it provides a good separation of concerns, but 
in practice it always ended up being too complex to work with. The 
dependencies between components and the message passing were hard to 
deal with nicely. In the end I would just fall back to a much simpler 
model to represent game objects.

> http://hg.savannah.nongnu.org/hgweb/gacela/
>
> But it's the previous version with an object oriented vision and a
> little unstable. I am designing a new approach based on entity systems
> and I hope I start writing code soon.

I'm interested to see how you implement your entity-component system. 
You seem to have a better idea of how to do it than I do.

> Cheers.
>
> --
> Javier Sancho Fernández - http://www.jsancho.org/
> Associate Member of the Free Software Foundation - http://www.fsf.org/
> Contra el DRM - http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm