TinyECS

A mean lean Entity-Component-System library.

TinyECS is not a ready-to-go game engine framework, it is a small library of some very performance critical pieces and common utility classes that can be used to make a game from scratch.

See also:

• tiny-ecs-physics
• tiny-ecs-canvas-2d

Installation

Works on the server or the browser (via Browserify):

npm install tiny-ecs

Usage

Manage your entities via an EntityManager instance:

var EntityManager = require('tiny-ecs').EntityManager;

var entities = new EntityManager();

Creating Entities

Create an entity with the default Transform component:

var hero = entities.create();

Or if you don't want to include the Transform component:

var hero = entities.createEntity();

Adding Components

A component is just a basic Javascript class.

function PlayerControlled()
{
  this.gamepad = 1;
}

function Sprite()
{
  this.image = 'hero.png';
}

Add the components:

hero.addComponent(Damager).addComponent(Sprite);

We now have new data members on our entity for the components. TinyECS will add an instance member that is the name of the component constructor, lowercased:

hero.playerControlled.gamepad = 2;
hero.sprite.image === 'hero.png'; // true

Add arbitrary text tags to an entity:

hero.addTag('player');

You can also remove components and tags in much the same way:

hero.removeComponent(Sprite);
hero.removeTag('player');

To determine if an entity has a specific component:

if (hero.hasComponent(Transform)) { ... }

And to check if an entity has ALL of a set of components:

if (hero.hasAllComponents([Transform, Sprite])) { ... }

Querying Entities

The entity manager is setup with indexed queries, allowing extremely fast querying of the current entities. Querying entities returns an array of entities.

Get all entities that have a specific set of components:

var toDraw = entities.queryComponents([Transform, Sprite]);

Get all entities with a certain tag:

var enemies = entities.queryTag('enemy');

Removing Entities

hero.remove();

Creating Components

Any object constructor can be used as a component, nothing special required. Components should be lean, primarily data containers, leaving all the heavy lifting for the systems.

Creating Systems

In TinyECS, there is no formal notion of a system. A system is considered any context in which entities and their components are updated. As to how this occurs will vary depending on your use.

In the example of a game, mainting a list of systems that are instantiated with some sort of IoC container that request a list of entities seems like a good idea.

function PhysicsSystem(entities)
{
  // Dependency inject -- reference to our EntityManager
  this.entities = entities;
}

PhysicsSystem.prototype.update = function(dt, time)
{
  var toUpdate = this.entities.queryComponents([Transform, RigidBody]);

  toUpdate.forEach(function(entity) { ... });
  ...
}

Tern Support

The source files are all decorated with JSDoc3-style annotations that work great with the Tern code inference system. Combined with the Node plugin (see this project's .tern-project file), you can have intelligent autocomplete for methods in this library.

Testing

Testing is done with Tape and can be run with the command npm test.

Automated CI cross-browser testing is provided by Testling.

License

Copyright 2014 Brandon Valosek

TinyECS is released under the MIT license.