With some discussion going in a previous article about how to actually implement some sort of component system for a game engine, without vague theory or dogma, a need for some higher level perspective was reached, and so this article arose.

In general an aggregation model is often useful when piecing together bits of functionality or data to create something new. The ability to do so is very useful for writing game-specific gameplay code due the flexibility of code granted by aggregation. However as of late there’s been tremendous talk about OOP, Entity Systems, Inheritance, and blah blah blah. More and more buzzwords get tossed around by big name writers and the audience really just looks for some guidelines to follow in hopes of writing good code.

Sadly there isn’t going to be a set of step by step rules for writing a game engine or coming up with a good architecture. Like many of said before me, writing a game is a specific task requiring specific solutions. Why do you think game engine developers such as Epic or the Unity guys have so many people working on the product? Because a generic game engine is a huge piece of software that requires a lot of features. Some features exist simply to let users add in custom features easily.

Components, aggregation, Entity Component Systems, Entity systems, these are just words and have various definitions (depending on who you ask).

Some Definitions

To hopefully avoid silly arguments and confusion lets define some terms. If you don’t like the definitions here feel free to express so, I’m all up for criticism and debate.

• Component Based Architecture
  • A preference for aggregation over inheritance. Is just a concept and does not lead to a single specific implementation. A game object is a collection of components. A component defines data and/or functionality for a concept.
• Entity Component System (ECS)
  • A specific implementation of Component Based Architecture. A game object would be an ID (an integer). The ID is used to form an aggregate. Usually an ECS implies an implementation similar to a database, where components are entries into a database that are looked up through some identifier. The main goals of this implementation are efficiency and simplicity. Often times the term “ECS” is used just to describe a Component Based Architecture, often leading to confusion.
• Aggregation
  • I like to think of this as a “has-a” relationship over an “is-a” relationship. Aggregation refers to one object “having” another object, which implies an aggregate is a collection (data structure) of other objects.

Some Truth and History

Aggregation is useful from a game design perspective. It frees functionality from arbitrary classification (classes and inheritance). Classes were originally created in C++ to let a programmer tie together a piece of data and some functionality to represent some sort of real-life concept. This is in simplest terms the essence of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Over time more features were added to help engineer relationships between classes, one such feature came in the form of inheritance.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with OOP and it makes sense in a lot of code. Problems can arise when there’s a mis-application of OOP that has implications that aren’t fully understood at the time of implementation that cause negative affects down the road. I’m sure we’ve all seen the code migration and mega-class example so commonly thrown around in articles arguing against OOP and inheritance abuse.

In response to such an abuse a new paradigm became popularized which focused on aggregation of functionality to form an object. This might be called a “component based architecture”. In general aggregation can be considered an appropriate alternative to inheritance.

OOP Diatribe

Usually when an article spews forth caustic attacks against OOP it’s directed at naive implementations that disregard implications of how memory is accessed. Perhaps in the past the bottleneck of most everything was processor speed, so a lot of literature focuses on this. Nowadays CPUs on the PC have an architecture that have ridiculous computational power with extremely limited memory access. In general one might consider accessing memory from RAM 300 times slower than multiplying two floats together. Of course this last statement is extremely anecdotal without any evidence, but exists just to give a rough perspective of reality in many current (2014) cases.

If objects with associated code (classes) are just allocated and deallocated on the heap at will then a performance bottleneck of memory access is going to rear its ugly face, likely long before other performance issues are even on the radar. This is where much of the diatribe comes from.

It should be noted that pretty much all code bases that make use of the C++ language use classes and structures in some form or another. As long as a programmer has an understanding of memory, how it’s accessed, and what implications arise from given implementations, nothing will go wrong. Alas, actually doing these things and writing good code is super hard. It doesn’t matter if a class has some implementation code within it, so long as that bit of code makes sense for the purposes it is serving.

Implementing Components, a First Draft

The most immediate implementation would be to make use of multiple inheritance. This has a clear definition of where the data goes, and it all goes in one class -the derived class. Multiple inheritance itself can get a bit tricky when dealing with pointer typecasting between derived and base types, though the C++ language itself handles the details much of the time.

Inheritance alone doesn’t provide a good mechanism to query whether a base class is apart of a specific derived aggregation and so the dynamic cast operator is born. Since the dynamic cast is a branching operation, usually implemented (afaik) by inspecting the vtable, it is avoided in general.

Multiple inheritance also does all sorts of work to member function pointers, and is just a sad part of C++. Additionally there isn’t any language feature that allows for dynamic dispatch for combinations of base classes, so if the need arises a custom solution will need to be implemented anyway.

Memory accessing, although defined, isn’t ideal. Multiple inheritance forms a blob of different data, and usually only a single piece of the blob is needed at any given time, meaning locality of reference will be poor in general. This leads to the idea of inheriting from multiple interfaces in order to decouple memory aggregation from functionality aggregation, which leads to the next draft.

Second Draft – Run-Time Aggregation

Instead of using multiple inheritance on interfaces, which is a compile-time feature, run-time support can be added. Object aggregates can be formed during run-time, and modified thereafter. This is appealing for data driven applications, and game-design friendly development iteration speed.

So lets assume that some programmer wants to implement components, but doesn’t think much about memory access patterns the implications therein. Using a vector of pointers an implementation of components becomes super simple. Each pointer can point to an interface exposing a few functions like Update, Init and Shutdown.

Searching for a particular component is as simple as linearly looping over each pointer until a matching type is found. If these pointers are ordered in some way a search can be performed, perhaps a binary search could suffice. If the identifier of a component is hashable a hash table lookup can be used.

The implementation so far is an excellent one except that there is no definition of how memory is allocated and accessed! In the most naive of implementation each game object and each component will be allocated on the heap with separate calls to malloc.

Despite having no clear memory definition there are some nice benefits that have arisen. Data driving the composition of an aggregate becomes quite trivial as each component of an aggregation can have an entirely isolated lifetime. Adding, removing, modifying, or even creating new components at run-time are all now possibilities. This dynamic aggregate architecture is great for improving game development and design iteration time!

Aggregation and Components and the Entity System Paradigm (ES/ECS)

As stated in the definitions section, an ECS is just a specific implementation of a component based architecture. A component based architecture game engine architecture would be a custom implementation of multiple inheritance. A clearly defined ECS can impose restrictions on how a component architecture is implemented and used in hopes of avoided poor memory access patterns, or in hopes of keeping code simple and orderly.

If a component is designed as a piece of memory without any code, and a game object defined as an integer ID then performance specifications can be easily imposed. Rules about where in memory components lay, and how components are actually accessed can be clearly defined in simple terms. Code can be written that operates upon arrays of components, transforming arrays linearly. This idea is actually a type of Data Oriented Design (DOD), which makes sense as DOD is just an idea! ECS is an application of the idea of DOD.

So with this type of implementation the benefits of dynamic composition can be paired with well-defined memory layout and access patterns. Suddenly prefetching and parallelism become much simpler to support.

Aggregatize all the Things!

There’s a problem. Blindly shoving the idea of an ECS implementation into every nook and cranny of a codebase is just silly (when the codebase in question is an entire finished game). Often times a particular system is not best implemented with a component or aggregate paradigm in mind.

An obvious case is that of a physics engine. Often times a physics engine developer is worried about collision detection, solving systems of linear equations, rigid body mechanics and allowing the engine to easily be integrated into existing code bases. These details involve a lot of math and good API design. A developer of a physics engine is going to have their focus employed in full force in solving problems specific to physics engines. This means that the engineer’s focus is finite, so the implementation that is best is one that the engineer can actually bring to completion. An implementation that can come to completion is one that makes sense for the specific details of whatever is going on inside the physics engine. The specific paradigms used are often not aggregation or component based!

In order for a physics engine to run fast it needs to have efficient memory access patterns and memory usage, on modern PC hardware, requires some form of DOD. Since this complex (often black boxed) physics engine will have it’s own specific implementation and optimization it doesn’t make sense to force a component based model to its very core with some sort of idealistic zeal. It gets really bad when strict rules are imposed (like banning all code from classes and structures that define components) on the component model (like with an ECS) and the rules start permeating the deep recesses of the entire code base.

The same thing goes for any sort of complex rendering engine or graphics system. Actually this applies to any complex system that requires high performance that exists within a game engine. The core facilities of a game engine often times just don’t really care about components or aggregation, and just care about operating specific and well defined data inputs. This means that an engine architecture that implements components will usually have to deal with middleware graphics/physics engines/libraries that don’t subscribe to a component based model. In practice light wrapper components can be created to let the functionality of such systems be presented in a component format, ready to be used in an aggregate object.

What does this all mean? What should we all do?

Use components where it makes sense in code. Use inheritance where it makes sense in code. Use databases where they make sense. Use all the things where they should. This is a pretty sad answer but it’s the right one. There is no silver bullet paradigm that solves all the problems in the game engine architecture world, and there are no steps to follow to achieve a result that works in all cases. Specific problems require specific solutions. Good code is hard to write, and will require a lot of judgement calls. In order to make good judgement calls a lot of experience and perspective is required.

I recommend using aggregation where it really matters. Dynamic aggregation is important for gameplay specific code. Gameplay specific code, in this article, would refer to code that would not easily apply or work at all in a different game. It’s code that is your game and doesn’t define an isolated system or functionality.

Dynamic aggregation and the component based model are extremely important for game and object editors. Game design flourishes best when iteration times are driven to zero, and the ability to create new things from a composition of fundamentals is very valuable! Clearly composition is useful, but how it’s to be used is the hard part.

What Components to Make?

I recommend making components concerned with providing access to game-independent functionality to be quite large. Every 3D game engine has a concept of a mesh, and will usually have some sort of file format to associate with, like FBX. Every 2D game engine will have the concept of a sprite. Each game using Box2D will have colliders and rigid bodies, and possibly joints. These fundamental pieces of functionality don’t change very often, so static compile-time relationships aren’t a bad thing since iteration time isn’t really all that relevant.

A 3D game might have a single Mesh component for example. A Mesh component can have renderable vertices, and possibly all the skeletal and animation information as well. There may be a single Rigid Body component, which encapsulates the idea of colliders or shapes, as well as the functionality of rigid body mechanics. The Rigid Body component might even contain all necessary code and data to hold multiple joints! Or joints may be a component themselves.

For high level and gameplay related features components can become much more granular. Gameplay should be iterated, tested and changed frequently, so having small and decomposed components will probably make a lot of sense. Usually efficiency isn’t so important for this type of code, so any implementation that is decently performant will suffice.

Scripting languages, dynamic memory allocation and virtual dispatch, or what have you can all work. The decisions of what requires flexibility, what requires performance and all between can be difficult to make. Please see the references section for some concrete examples.

Further Readings

Hopefully this section will grow as time goes on. For now I need to sleep.

Reference Source Code

The best reference I know of is an open source game engine in progress I myself am developing. Hopefully this section will grow as time goes on. For now I need to sleep.