On: Open 3D Engine

[lizmat]

I guess in Raku you would create a Boat role, and you would create a clone of a House instance with the Boat role mixed in, when needed.

In Raku speak:

    my $house = House.new;
    my $houseboat = $house but Boat;

See: https://docs.raku.org/routine/but

There would be no need to de-compose.

[fenomas → lizmat]

But note that the point of an ECS is being able to dynamically change roles without recreating new entities. If changing a house into a houseboat means creating a new entity, then everyone who had a reference to the house would need to be informed of the new reference.

[lizmat → fenomas]

Doesn't de-composing have the same issue, though?

[fenomas → lizmat]

I'm not sure I follow. In ECSs that I'm familiar with, entities are integer IDs, not class objects. So adding or removing components (roles) to an entity doesn't make use of any language-level features, it's just calls to the ECS library. E.g. in JS:

    var id = ecs.createEntity()     // returns an int
    ecs.addComponent(id, 'house')
    ecs.addComponent(id, 'boat')

So, very different from the class-based approach being floated a few comments ago. Does that answer your question?

[raiph → fenomas]

Liz suggested `but`, but that creates a new entity with the role mixed in.

Instead one can use `does` to mix in to an existing entity:

    role House {}
    role Boat {}

    my \id = 42;
    id does House;
    id does Boat;

    say id ~~ House; # True

(What's missing is the ability to drop a mixin once it's been added via `does`.)