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GeonBit

ECS-based Game Engine powered by MonoGame for C# games.

Glossary

Before diving deeper into GeonBit, lets define some basic concepts (these are relevant to most ECS engines out there):

GameObject

Game Objects are our main entities in the Engine. They are the Entities of the Entity-Component-System model. Every element of the game is implemented by a Game Object with components attached to it, from monsters to scripting and sound effects.

There is only one type of a GameObject, the difference between objects reside in the component types attached to them. For example, if you want to place trees in your game, you’ll probably create a GameObject with a 3D model of a tree + physical body attached to it.

Every GameObject have a list of child GameObjects, and a 3D scene node that represent its transformations in 3d space (eg position, rotation, scale etc).

Components

Components are the logic pieces you attach to GameObjects, like a 3d model to render, a physicla body, sound effect to play, etc.

A GameObject without any components is just a node in the Scene, it has transformations and a 3D position and can hold children, but it doesn’t do much without any Components. To make a GameObject a meaningful part of your game, you attach Components to it.

Most components are independent and do not communicate with each other, but there are some exceptions that depeand on each other or even affect the transformations of the GameObject itself (for example, physics-related components often change the position & rotation of the GameObject containing them).

Note that Components are also the objects you will implement the most. For example, to create an AI to control your game monsters, you’ll probably write some sort of an NPCs-Controller component and attach it to your monsters Game Objects.

SceneNode

Every GameObject has a scene node that represent its 3d transformations, eg position, scale, rotation, etc. Unlike the GameObject that only has one type, there are many types of SceneNodes that behave differently and are optimized for different purposes. We will cover those later.

Prototypes

Since different objects in the game are made of GameObject with components attached to them, you probably want a way to define a game-specific type and create instances of it with all the components it needs. To do so, we use Prototypes.

A Prototype is an instance of a GameObject you register to the Prototypes Manager and later you can create clones of it, or ‘instanciate’ it if you will.

Scene

A Scene is a tree of GameObjects + some global settings, that represent a level or a ‘screen’ in your game.

Scenes can be easily loaded / unload to switch between levels and scenery.