Coding has started

[AthenaOfDelphi]

I'll try and do my best to explain, but I didn't write that part of the design.

An entity within the engine could be many things. An in-game object for example. But to become those things you attach components to it. So for example, if you want an in-game item, it is an entity that has a mesh component attached to it and a material component. Thus you could have multiple instances of an item, they all look identical, whilst at the same time they have their own properties such as location and orientation.

That's about the best I can do at the moment in terms of an explanation/clarification. If you need more, hopefully one of the other's will provide it.

[pstudio]

What you describe is a entity/component design. I get that.

However this design seems to me to be a hybrid of entity/component design and traditional inheritance based object hierachy. If someone could explain me the reasoning why e.g. positional or light data is a core part of an entity and not added through another component it would be appreciated.

[Mirage]

However this design seems to me to be a hybrid of entity/component design and traditional inheritance based object hierachy. If someone could explain me the reasoning why e.g. positional or light data is a core part of an entity and not added through another component it would be appreciated.

There is no any strong reasons to not making light data as a component. So it may be implemented like that.

Position data is not as simple.
Positionable objects should be stored in a spatial data structure using their positions.
Also a transformation hierarchy should be maintained efficiently.
According to preliminary analysis having position data as a core part of each game entity will cause less indirect references to the data.
But during actual implementation this may be revised.

[pstudio]

Ok, sounds fair enough. Curious to see the final design though it's obviously a long time away.

Btw. I'm sure some of you are aware of this site but http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ is a good first source for patterns to consider when implementing a game/engine.

I wish you good luck and hope you will keep us other nicely updated with any progress on the engine