Meeting C++ 2025 - Insights into Entity Component Systems

Helmut Hlavacs

Marlene Kasper

On Day 2 at 17:15 (CET/Berlin) in Track D online

Entity Component Systems (ECS) are important data structures heavily used e.g. in video games. They implement a composition pattern, allowing them to cluster data belonging to particular entities dynamically. The proposed talk deals with possible architectural choices for ECS, how to optimize them for different purposes, and how to use them. We also show how to quickly create ECS from scratch using LLMs, although not being optimized. 

We also introduce the Vienna Entity Component System (VECS), an ECS for research and teaching developed at the University of Vienna. VECS is optimized for data-oriented access occurring with high frequencies, i.e., every frame in a video game. We present the VECS implementation, usage, its performance in relation to other ECS, and how access can be parallelized.

We furthermore present a tool for live visualization of the content of a VECS instance. This tool shows overviews and details about the entities currently stored in a VECS by taking snapshots, and summaries about the dynamic change.

You can find VECS here https://github.com/hlavacs/ViennaEntityComponentSystem

Please login to comment