Of Cyclical Rewriting

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother. It all started because there was a bug in the NTL compiler apparently not recognizing handler tokens. I could have sat down and probably fixed it in a bunch of hours. But no. I had to put the whole NTL language idea aside (as I said to Zak, it was mainly a "programming masturbation", but a cool one ;( ) and fall back to XML.

Well, I think it's eventually a good choice since XML is widespread, can be read by almost anything, espresso machines included, and is an accepted standard.

Luckily I didn't have to rewrite all the code that actually creates CLR assemblies out of the entity system definitions you spam in, or it would have been serious pain. Much pain.

Anyway. While I was at it, I also removed a feature which I didn't like. When the entities were processed and turned to IL, they were added a field named Prototype, which contained an EntityPrototype object basically describing the objects referenced by the entity; this means components, handlers and handled messages. All of this just to speed up entity creation at runtime.

However, I had forgotten once again about Attributes, and why they're in the CLR. So, armed with loads of patience but handicapped by lack of proper sleep, I set to remove this prototype stuff and go on with attributes. Now I'm in the middle of realizing what's the next step.

The most annoying part is that I am storing Types via their TypeHandles (actually their RuntimeTypeHandle.Values ToInt32()ed); this basically means creating a type storage via indices; this so reminds me of the database stuff I have going on at work - though, when I started to ramble about entity systems, I kind of expected it.

I had a nice demo going on but it's no more. Raaargh. Here's hoping it won't be long until I have something actually doing its job again.

I'm out.

07 Sept. Edit: Well, it wasn't as bad as I initially thought. I managed to get things up and running again, now including some things like proper component installation and uninstallation. Since my programming life is full of happy gummybears again, I can commit some time to the actual entity system editor. I'll keep you posted.

Entity System and Lua

Lately the Entity System code has been getting more and more complex, to the point that I had to read what I was writing very carefully (and sometimes reading aloud too... go figure).
I have some news about it... about time!

The good news is that it is almost complete! It's a joyful day for me. Object pooling, message dispatching... stuff that works! I still have to finish adding and removing components dynamically (right now we just get the components we defined per entity in an NTL file).

The bad news is that Lua hates me, and it's giving me all kind of exceptions. I think I know what's going on and the relative fix, but if said fix did not work, I'd be in serious troubles. Basically, Lua needs to know what types you're working with, otherwise it would just sit and cry pitifully, making you feel guilty for such carelessness. And it makes sense, of course. LuaInterface is a mysterious world, I still have to figure out thoroughly how the .NET bridging works - luckily the source code is freely available.

At some point of yesterday evening, while bashing my head on the desk for the umpteenth exception, I even felt like writing a Lua compiler / interpreter from scratch in order to get rid of problems when interfacing with the CLR. Sadly, it's a task beyond my available time and most likely experience as well. It would be a great challenge, though.

I still haven't performed any performance tests, but I know in advance I will have to make sure a) the object pool isn't raping the heap b) entity creation is quick and painless, and so is its disposal.

I know it's all a bit vague, but I'll be sure to release the NTL environment as soon as I have something worth attention.

Have a good and productive .NET day! (...rolololflol.)