Category Archives: Entity/Component System

Flambe versus the World!

The game.

The (HTML5) engines war
You probably didn’t miss the engines war of the previous month: Unity announced Unity5 with WebGL support (which I already pre-ordered hurrah!) and Unreal Engine 4 did the same with an incredible price. That was for the big guys.
From a more indie friendly point of view, PixiJS continue to kick ass with awesome new features (cacheAsBitmap, blend mode for canvas, SpriteBatch…). Phaser using PixiJS as its rendering engine, is becoming much more popular every day and obviously more stable. PixiJS has really the wind in its sails because OpenFL switched to it for its HTML5 rendering engine!

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Citrus Engine V3 Beta2

Hey there! On this hot summer day, I’m happy to share a new major beta for the Citrus Engine! There are lots of new features, improvements, bug fixes and a new demo for mobile devices. It is also updated on the last version of each library.

Download it on Google Code or GitHub.

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An entity/component system’s attempt using Box2D

One year ago, I heard about the Entity/Component Model for the first time. It seemed to be awesome for game design / development. This is 3 links/resources for a good introduction : Gamasutra the Entity Component Model, Entity Systems are the future of MMOG development, Entity Systems. Then Richard Lord has made a very good blog post with code example using his own framework : Ash. And finally, Shaun Smith’s experience using Ash.

All the code example is available on the new Citrus Engine’s GitHub repository. Compile the src/entity/Main.as

During this year, entity/component system has always been something I wanted to try… but that was scary : this is not OOP, that’s a new way of programming. I wanted to add this system to the Citrus Engine as an option to handle complex object. For basic object OOP is great and easy to set up, but for complex game object which may have new abilities on the fly, you’ve quickly a Class with 700 lines of code and conditions. Not easy to maintain some weeks later. The Citrus Engine handles physics engine (Box2D & Nape) & a simple math-based collision-detection system. However it comes built-in with a “platformer” starter-kit based on Box2D, so I made my entity/component system’s experiments using Box2D. And that was not simple.

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Doubly linked list and object pooling

After holidays, it’s time to get back to work 🙂
I was really busy last month, so this is some news on what I did and what is going on :

– I’ve made some experiments with the Citrus Engine on the Hero adding some functionality. But what appears is the Hero class becomes more and more complex… So I asked its creator if he knows a system/model which has a modular way to add features to the hero. And he gives me some information about the Entity/Component model. Woah, it is awesome! It’s really a new way of thinking about programming. No more OOP. This is 3 useful links/resources if you are interested : Gamasutra the Entity Component Model, Entity Systems are the future of MMOG development, Entity Systems. This links are very interesting, but there isn’t any implementation. You can find implementations with the PushButton Engine (flash), Artemis (java). However it is really complex, so I was not able to create a Component/Entity System for the CE due to my lack of experience… but if its creator has time, he will do!

– I was in holidays at Praha (Czech Republic), amazing city/country! And beer is really cheap 🙂

– I’m currently reading the book of Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design it’s a masterpiece! Really, really interesting, lots of awesome advices. Approved & Recommended!

– I’m working/designing my next portfolio. It will be nice… 😉

– On Thursday 15 September, I go back to the Gobelins school! And I will make a point with Tiffany about Kinessia. We are thinking to create the game for mobile. I hope we will have enough time (there are already lots of project at school…), so stay tuned!

– Mobile, tablet and game design/programming is interesting me more and even more. This is two good links on mobile game programming : Starting with AIR for Android and iOS – building one app for both platforms, and Building mobile games in Adobe AIR – optimization techniques.

– And finally I’m also waiting FDT5 to invest more time in haXe and WebGL!

I think it’s enough for the news at the moment! Now it’s time to speak about the topic, this week I wanted to make some algorithms, doubly linked list and object pooling are a good exercice. Previously I made an oral in my school to introduce recurisivity and data structures (pdf link in french). Doubly linked list and object pooling are techniques optimizations used in game development and especially on mobile devices.

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