Designing with Planck

note

We're going to be getting into some advanced topics regarding design patterns and practices for you to use when working with Planck and with ECS in general.

If you haven't already read The Basics, you should go and do that now.

When working with an ECS, or just with Planck and its many features, it's easy to fall into dangerous patterns which can either affect the maintainability of your project or introduce certain bugs and issues.

Off By A Frame Issues

One of the most frequent issues we will be addressing are 'off-by-a-frame' bugs. While your systems and game as a whole should be able to function still with these issues present, the effect of it is visible latency in your game.

This was briefly introduced in Introduction under 'Does any of this really matter?'.

Let's say we have systemA and systemB. systemA modifies data in our world which systemB depends on. If systemA runs after systemB, then systemB will have to wait a whole frame for the modifications to be made.

When a system has to wait a whole frame for an operation it depends on, we introduce latency into our game. This latency has the potential to be visible to players, who call it lag.

The best way to address this is by assigning systemA and systemB to different Phases, with systemA's Phase running before systemB's Phase.

We will go into detail on when to create a Phase, what Phases systems should be assigned to, and more later on.

Credits

These design guides were inspired and influenced by the Flecs and Matter documentation.

What's Next?

Let's continue where we left off and talk about Phases.