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.

Continue reading An entity/component system’s attempt using Box2D →