Hi, everyone~
I'm developing a third-person shooter game with the Unity Engine(C#).
After read some articles about the entity component system(ECS)[1][2][3][4], I decided to use the ECS pattern for my game.
The sample code below shows my first design.
player {
// components(pure data)
input;
movement;
position;
health;
// system
humanAnimatorController {input, movement}
humanMovementController {input, movement}
humanAttackController {input}
humanUserInput {input}
}
zombie {
// components(pure data)
input;
movement;
position;
health;
// system
zombieAnimatorController {input, movement}
zombieMovementController {input, movement}
zombieAttackController {input}
zombieAIInput {input}
}
Everything seems fine until I decided to add some unique actions to a zombie, like bite, eat, crawl...
The problem is, the input component doesn't contain such input data(bite, eat, crawl...) that the zombieAttackController needs.
Below is some of my thoughts, but I'm still not sure how to do it.
1. Make the input component contain all the possible data, e.g.
input {
Vector3 move;
bool action_bite,
bool action_eat,
bool action_crawl,
...
}
// Or this way
input {
map<string, object> input_data;
}
2. Make another component for zombie input, like zombieInput
zombie {
// components(pure data)
input;
zombieInput; // new component for zombie, contain special inputs like bite, eat, crawl...
movement;
position;
health;
// system
zombieAnimatorController {input, zombieInput, movement}
zombieMovementController {input, zombieInput, movement}
zombieAttackController {input, zombieInput}
zombieAIInput {input, zombieInput}
} This may add too many components to the system, there might be ninjaInput, robotInput, rifleInput, tankInput, which also decrease the reusablity of my code.
3. Traditional OOP solution or some other solutions.
