Photon is a WIP entity-component-system (ECS) written in C++. Photon is designed to be fast and lightweight, staying out of the way and allowing the programmer create their game.
An entity-component-system is a paradigm used in game development where game objects, or entities, are composed of data structures, or components. Functions, called systems, are designed to operate on the entities based on thee components they contain. This design through composition stands in contrast to the traditional object-oriented approach to game development. You can read more about the basics of an ECS here and here. Other names for ECS include entity-system and component-entity-system.
Photon attempts to do the following things for the developer:
- Provide a basic structure to create components
- Provide an abstract implementation of a class with which entities are managed
- Provide a basic structure to create systems
- Define the storage of components such that they maintain cache-coherency
Photon does not attempt to do any of the following:
- Define a fully-functional implementation of an entity manager. That is left to the developer
- Define any sets of components for use in games
- Define any systems
- Be purely non-object-oriented. Some developers consider a non-OO ECS to be a necessity, but this is not a design goal in Photon.
Photon uses CMake to handle build systems on different platforms. Currently the
CMakeLists assumes that you are using GCC or MSVC, and support for other
compilers is not assured. Photon only depends on the C++ standard library, but
it requires the C++17 (C++1z) version of the standard library because it makes
use of the any object. (Note: On older versions of GCC, use of the
any-experimental header will not work)
To build Photon you will need a compiler that supports C++17 (particularly the
any object found in the standard library for C++17). On Windows, MSVS 2017's
compiler supports C++17. On Linux, GCC > 7.0 should suffice. Clang is currently
untested. To use CMake with Photon you must use CMake 3.8 or above.
In photon/:
$ mkdir build$ cd build$ cmake ..
On Windows, use the generated PHOTON.sln files.
On Linux, CMake generates a MakeFile. Invoke it with make while in build/.
Using build/ isn't necessary but build/ and Build/ are included in the
.gitignore, so using these directories are recommended.
There is also a Doxygen file available. Simply cd over to doc and run
doxygen doxyfile to generate HTML/LaTeX docs.
Photon is licensed under the MIT License.