Top all-time · #5332
T-machine.org
Personal blog · t-machine.orgstartupsgamescareer
T-machine.org is a personal blog at t-machine.org about startups, games and career. Since 2009, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link t-machine.org for Adam Martin's 2007 posts that defined entity systems (ECS) in game development, where components hold data and systems operate on it. Commenters cite them as the origin of the idea.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-11-22
- /index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-2/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-26
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-30
What Hacker News says?
Ignoring the specific claims in the patent (automatic memory optimization or whatever), if we're just going by entity component system articles, we can do a lot better. Here's one from 2007: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are... IIRC this one was the one to really popularise the idea of not storing any component data in the entities. If you loosen that requirement, there were earlier ones s…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Unity patents ECS”Submitted When GitHub kills Open Source as a story · 84 points
HN discussionIt would be fair to attribute the ECS naming (specifically, making "Systems" an integral concept to the, ahem, system) to this from 2007: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are...
Comment linking /index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-2/
on “Why isn't Godot an ECS-based game engine?”Submitted Recruiters: My fee for referrals is 5% as a story · 72 points
HN discussionDungeon Siege, although the slides where this was revealed seem to no longer be online. Additionally, here is the blog post from 2007 that largely introduced the concept in the form we know now, based on the Dungeon Siege talk and others: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are... Although, arguably, Dungeon Siege's component architecture is different from what we call ECS today. EDIT: I found t…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Why isn't Godot an ECS-based game engine?”Submitted Should freelancers in gamedev industry sign NDA’s? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMostly modern game engines use an entity system[1], which is a form of database (global data, I guess, in as much as any database is). The main loop then steps through each component (of which physics would be one) and lets it update the entity data for all entities. This pattern took over from class/inheritance based architectures about 10 years ago. There have been some suggestions that Functional Reactive Program…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Annotated code: Circles bouncing off lines”Submitted VCs, Angels and ghetto testing: They are wrong as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is really not a good example as games have (read should have) entity systems. See e.g. these two links for an introduction. http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are... http://www.purplepwny.com/blog/?p=215 There should be no Draw() in your game object (read entity) base class. Not every entity is rendered. You should have instead a component Renderable. And if it happens to be so that your s…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Goodbye, shitty "Car extends Vehicle" object-orientation tutorial”Submitted We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere are some abstract similarities, but neither COM nor Unity GameObjects/Components are an "implementation" of that pattern, since they were both invented a long time before 2007 when Adam Martin defined ECS in "Entity Systems are the future of MMOG development": http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are... ECS builds on top of some of the ideas of COM and GameObject/Component, but loses much o…
Comment linking /index.php/2014/03/08/data-structures-for-entity-systems-contiguous-memory/
on “Goodbye, shitty Car extends Vehicle object-orientation tutorial (2011)”- M8 · 2015-04-30
Modern approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system One of the proponents: http://t-machine.org
Comment linking /
on “Comparison of Doom 1, Quake, and Doom 3 entity references system” You might want to look at how people are approaching components now. Instead of components containing logic, components only contain data. You then have systems that operate on the components. This solves the problem of needing components to interact with each other, since a system can look at as many components as it wants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/11…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-2/
on “Game Programming Patterns – Bytecode”Unity is not for everyone though. There is a lot of hobbyists who prefer writing games instead of scripting ready-made chunks. Also it has a lot of warts (nothing is ideal): http://t-machine.org/index.php/2013/12/27/2014-entity-system... XNA is a good public image making tool, not just an API. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23becauseofXNA&src=hash MonoGame is unfortunately still lacking an own content pipeline.
Comment linking /index.php/2013/12/27/2014-entity-systems-what-are-your-unity3d-questions-and-problems/
on “Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface”Related: a guy trying to fix the Unity3D's broken core - http://t-machine.org .
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Minimal MVC Framework for Unity3D”Wow, cool. I was wondering when these would show up here on HN. For a more thorough treatment, you may want to read this series of posts by Adam Martin : http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are...
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Evolve your hierarchy”Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think the problem is what everyone always says - that parallel programming is super hard and most programmers cant effectively program for multicore systems. Instead I think the problem is one of education and training. How many programmers actually get decent training and education in multicore programming? I don't think its very many. Of all the programmers complaining how hard it is t…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “The Trouble With Multicore”It looks to me that a lot of game programmers are moving away from OO in favour of data-oriented approaches, emphasizing things like structures of arrays (while OOP more or less emphasizes arrays of structures), entity systems (they are becoming increasingly popular, a lot of engines now contain some kind of ES layer) and other similar concepts. Why? Because OO isn't a perfect fit to modern hardware, is often not th…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Object-Oriented Game Design”Same here. I still find it a bit misleading too. The game didn’t make it to AC:Valhalla, a texture-packing library that was made during its creation did[1] (not wanting to downplay that achievement, it’s worthy of a post in its own right, IMO). It’s also a bit of a stretch to claim it was the source of the ECS system used in Unity. I was using a game engine which used ECS prior to 2010. In the game engine world it s…
Comment linking /index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/
on “Show HN: Open-source shooter which made it to AC: Valhalla and Skydio drones”
