Introduction to Entity Component Frameworks

What's an ECF (Entity Component Framework)?

An ECF is where you create entities which are made of components inside a framework.

That definition wasn't too useful. Lets zoom in.

What is an entity?

Entities themselves do not do anything - you can think of them as just IDs. Instead, an entity has its own components which do the heavy lifting.

What is a component?

Components can contain data and behavior about your game. You can have a component with only data or a component with only behavior. For example, a Location component might just contain data in the form of a X and Y coordinate, while a Velocity component might contain a DX and DY fields as well as behavior to change the Location coordinate.

//only contains X and Y
record struct Position(float X, float Y);
record struct Velocity(float DX, float DY) : IUpdateComponent<Position>
{
    //has its own DX, DY, AND updates the position
    public void Update(ref Position position)
    {
        position.X += DX;
        position.Y += DY;
    }
}

Syntax? what is a record struct? what is a ref?

Why components?

You may have heard the phrase:

"Composition over inheritance"

Components follow composition, allowing for extremely simple code reuse. A health component for example can be given to an enemy entity, or a player entity, or a rock. There is no need to plan and force behaviors into unmaintainable long complex chains of inheritance.

Other notable projects that use an ECF are Monocle and Unity.

The Framework:

Frent takes composition to the next level by removing or alleviating overheads normally associated with heavy composition (virtual calls, object overhead, garbage collection), replacing them with the speed advantages of an ECS. With Frent, you get the best of all worlds. The intuition of OOP programming, flexibility of component oriented programming style, and the performance of an ECS.

Don't like ECFs anyways? Since Frent is powered by an ECS internally, it also exposes a way to directly Query entities in the style of a regular ECS.

The editor advantage