Oh,interesting, hadn’t seen the traits approach. That’s a fairly elegant solution.

I’m in C#-land, and I’m mostly rolling a Unity-like solution. But you still end up fighting your root node a bit.

Yup, that makes sense.

For me, ‘components’ are not much more opinionated than ‘nodes’.

It’s slightly tricky to roll your own component system in Godot because of inheritance - a root node usually needs to be a canonical type (Node3d/Rigidbody/etc), which makes adding an Entity API tricky.

And because this sort of thing is so common, people end up rolling their own solutions to implement this design pattern.

Which is fine! It’s just a bit more friction and a bit more ad-hoc (for me, at least).

Whereas in an engine with first class support for components, there’s a specific API for doing just those things - getting a component that’s on an entity by type; iterating over the components in an entity; broadcasting an event to all the components in an entity, etc.

The main thing with a component system is to break an entity entirely into reusable modules - AI, collision, inventory, etc).

You can do that in Godot with nodes - but there’s no canonical way to get a component; communicate from one component to another; broadcast an event to components, etc.

Good question!

Before I answer, to clarify - I also like Godot, and I don’t want an ECS per se (an ECS adds various other elements as well as ‘components’, which I’m not considering here).

Thanks! Although, Godot 4.4 mostly solves this now.

Will do!

I already had a pass at UberAudio, if that helps.

blog.simoncarter.me/blog/eventau...

Indeed - it’s still messy in the editor, and if you try to use inheritance to smooth out the rough edges you can end up in a fight with Node2D/Node3D/Rigidbody.

But fundamentally you need an organising principle, or you end up with random node hierarchies with ad-hoc signal wiring.

I made no such suggestion - merely expressed a regret that it doesn’t exist.

I should add, this isn’t ‘Unity Nostalgia Syndrome’. I’ve been using component systems for a long time - I wrote one for Fable 25 years ago - because it’s a flexible and low-opinion architecture.

That’s not what I suggested - as I say, I appreciate its agnosticism. At the same time, this agnosticism has drawbacks.

A game engine shouldn’t be a hammer or a pickaxe, it should be a Swiss Army knife. Godot does this well, but lacks a bottle opener, so I keep opening my beer with a knife.

Oh, many thanks - much appreciated!

Yes, XAML is a whole other conversation. :)