Re: sparse components

Terrance Cohen (of Insomniac fame) did a presentation recently on his dynamic component architecture at Canada GDC.  It sounds similar to the system you're describing.

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0ATIohmzo6z7TZGhjbmhidnFfMTg1MWNkcTJmcWZ4&hl=en

(presentation starts on slide 5).

--
jv

-----Original Message-----
>From: Javier Arevalo <[email protected]>
>Sent: May 28, 2010 8:18 AM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: [Sweng-Gamedev] sparse components
>
>You might enjoy this:
>
>http://www.insomniacgames.com/blogcast/blog/mike_acton/1500756
>
>Sorry I can't elaborate much, but I can tell you you're not the only one 
>thinking in that direction.
>
>On 5/28/2010 16:44 PM, Richard Fabian wrote:
>> I'm working on some stuff at the moment, a kind of collection of 
>> techniques that I've started pulling together into a more coherent 
>> single way of thinking.
>>
>> One of the techniques is something I've been calling Existence Based 
>> Processing, and it was born of my early implementations of component 
>> based development. I've now heard someone call it Push Processing, but 
>> can't find any references on Google, and wondered if anyone knew of 
>> the right search phrase.
>> In my component system, I oriented the component processing to a per 
>> component type rather than per entity, which meant I was keeping the I 
>> cache warm all the time. I was lucky, I hadn't noticed this benefit at 
>> the time, and now I do. Also, because components only existed for 
>> entities which needed them, there was no processing done for entities 
>> without that component. At the time I had simple finite state machines 
>> for AI that switched in and out which component the AI was using as a 
>> hierarchical FSM, but I've seen now that this rabbit hole goes deeper.
>>
>> So, what's this stuff called normally, and also, why aren't we taught 
>> anything about it, and why aren't we using it?
>>
>> I've seen speed ups in my own code due to rewriting small sections in 
>> this style, so can't fathom why we're not using it in general, or for 
>> that matter, taught it at all.
>>
>> I've breathed even more life into this technique with my current work 
>> on writing up my experience with data oriented development by adding 
>> or at least clarifying what this sparse existence component technique 
>> can offer, including some work on making your components behave as 
>> states for an FSM, or even, because now I only have the concept of an 
>> implicit core entity, the ability to generate multiple entities from 
>> one when needed (such as level of detail change), and also collapse 
>> multiple entities down to one when the level of detail is no longer 
>> necessary.
>>
>> A bit of background,: I was spurred on a bit by the "OOP is bad" talk 
>> into putting a bit more effort into what I was doing so that other 
>> people might benefit. The basis of my stuff is really a revisit to old 
>> computer science, relational databases to be specific, and leveraging 
>> what has been learned over the decades into something more useful for 
>> games. I've found that there are a number of parallels in database 
>> technology and current high performance game development, and I think 
>> it's because we're effectively in the same hardware situation, just 
>> scaled up a lot. I think of the old DB hard drives as our main memory, 
>> and their old small computers as being equivalent to our modern CPUs 
>> and parallel machines. That is, we're using powerful but small 
>> processing machines, committing transforms on the data set that is in 
>> a slow medium.
>>
>> I'm currently doing general research to find out if there are other 
>> old science techniques that we've forgotten, or not repurposed, while 
>> also writing a proof of concept rogue-like in 3D. This does mean I 
>> have to write two whole games that are exactly the same, as best I 
>> can, just to prove any of my research, but I hope that doing so I may 
>> come across some other unexpected discoveries.
>>
>
>-- 
>Javier Arevalo
>http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare
>
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