Everything You Need To Know About Entity Component System

In this video from the recently concluded DeplhiCon 2021, we will learn everything about the ECS or Entity Component Systems and how this particular method differs from traditional programming. This webinar is hosted by Erik Van Bilsen of Grijjy and this one-hour-long session will show us how the idea behind this ECS method can make you look at programming from a different angle. This software architectural pattern is often used in windows program development particularly in video game development for the storage of game world objects.

What is Entity Component System?

Bilsen described ECS as a programming paradigm that takes composition-over-inheritance to the extreme. ECS challenges the traditional concept of encapsulation and inheritance in favor of composition. It is also designed with performance in mind, both in terms of execution speed and memory storage. In this video, Bilsen will also guide us through the two different storage strategies including Array of Structs (AoS) and the Struct of Arrays (SoA), as well as the Arrays of Objects (AoO). We will also get a deeper look into what are entities, components, and systems actually are.

How to Implement ECS in Delphi?

This session will also provide us with a relative comparison between the inheritance and composition as well as the differences between the Entity Component System to traditional classes in programming. Aside from simply comparing a class-based approach and an ECS-based approach for the same programming problems, we will also get a sample usage demonstration of how you would use a simple ECS framework in Delphi. Fortunately, Delphi has all the tools you need to implement this paradigm. To know more about ECS, feel free to watch the video below.

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