Not only, it’s data-oriented… but to me, it looks like multiple systems doing Enum.map on a filtered set of entities.
kokolegorille
iacobson
New release v0.3.0
Introduces two new commands, making components creation even faster:
Ecspanse.Command.clone_entity!/1- clones the entity’s components, without its relationshipsEcspanse.Command.deep_clone_entity!/1- clones the entity together with its descendants
Introduces two new queries:
Ecspanse.Query.list_tags/1- list a component’s tagsEcspanse.Query.list_components/1- lists all entity’s components
1
Trevoke
This looks really cool - definitely better and more full-featured than what I wrote years ago with a gen_stage infrastructure ( GitHub - ecstatic-framework/ecstatic: An ECS (Entity-Component-System) framework in Elixir · GitHub ).
Out of curiosity, did you find this one when you were poking around, or not? (not like it’s maintained at the moment, obviously)
1
iacobson
Thanks. I think Ecspanse and ECSx try to solve the same “problem” but in different ways. I even mentioned ECSx as an alternative to Ecspanse in my Medium article.
Still, to try to answer your question, I think ECSx is more straightforward to get started with. You have generators and every component holds a single value. You can then query the individual components by their entity ID or as a list. But I think their guides section explains it better than I could.
On the other hand, Ecspanse has a bit more complicated approach, but I would say also offers more flexibility as the game becomes more complex. I would mention just a few of them:
- complex queries across multiple components, entities, and relationships
- out-of-the-box bidirectional entities relationships to make it easy to work with trees of entities, but especially with collections
- component templates and tags - to handle component collections and polymorphism.
You can find some more details and examples in the Medium article.
4
Trevoke
Oh, great to hear that it didn’t just die in the dark corners of the internet 
I originally extracted/reworked ECS as part of my work on my most off-the-rails project ever, which was an attempt to cross dwarf fortress and old-school MUDs: GitHub - Trevoke/dwarlixir: A dwarf-fortress clone / MUD / side project in Elixir · GitHub - but I never finished the refactor once I had extracted it.
In the Slack community I mention in the article - the MUD coders guild - the experience is fairly common, as most folks try to build a MUD from scratch, because it’s not so much about finishing a game as about learning from building the MUD; but we did notice that extracting or making ECS libraries/frameworks is where most MUD projects go to die.
A video game studio (WindFish Studio · GitHub ) found ecstatic a few years ago and tried to build a fairly ambitious project - some kind of world-scale simulation, IIRC - but I think they eventually ran out of funding to make the game.
@oestrich wrote GitHub - oestrich/ex_venture: Text based MMORPG engine written in Elixir · GitHub , has built at least one game on top of that, and a few other useful tools; he’s largely been more successful than me at building reasonable games and getting them to work 
3
iacobson
Very interesting. What was the plan for the UI (frontend) for dwarlixir?
I feel like this is a big minus for developing games in Elixir. Not many options for rendering and building native apps.
I’m thinking about some terminal UI like bracket-lib, or even something more advanced, such as macroquad.
I’m building my multiplayer game with Phoenix & LiveView. But I really think Elixir would be a great choice for making games like Caves of Qud or Cogmind.
0
Trevoke
Well, I am terrible at user interfaces, so I was going to make it a very simple command-line interface. And if you think that was probably going to be unplayably messy, you’re probably right
Yeah, I don’t really know what we do for GUIs with Erlang/Elixir, though we do have wx the erlang binding of wxWidgets — OTP 29.0.2 (wx 2.6) of course.
0
Nezteb
I know @ConnorRigby dabbles with game development using Elixir for the server part:
- https://twitter.com/Nezteb/status/1096165906441326592
- Using the Love2D game engine.
- His tweets with demo gifs were deleted, but the source is here: GitHub - ConnorRigby/love-challenges · GitHub
- coner @PressY4Pie@fosstodon.org on X: "making more progress on my @ziglang based 2d game - today i scafolded out the basics of netcode in it. Both clients are getting fed the same data from an @elixirlang server #gamedev https://t.co/ZcfNkGXtAE" / X
- Using the Zig programming language, though I don’t know which (if any) libraries.
- I’m not sure if he ever released the source for this.
- coner @PressY4Pie@fosstodon.org on X: "All meaning that one could in theory have a viable toolchain for building games, engines, etc all with a very capable networking and scheduling stack built right into the core, which is a thing i never really considered the ecosystem being particularly targeted at." / X
1