I seem to pick the end of semesters to be the most productive on my personal projects; it must be something to do about avoiding actual studying. The exciting news is that Entreri, my entity-component framework, has had some significant improvements and revisions. \u00a0Much of its codebase has been simplified and better segregated. \u00a0The primary classes: Entity, Component, and EntitySystem are now interfaces. \u00a0And maybe this wasn’t a big deal to the few people who use it, but it always bothered me, but now IndexedDataStore is gone and Property implementations are more consolidated.<\/p>\n
However, the biggest change of all is how component types are defined. In previous versions, there were two classes that represented components: Component, which was final and encoded only the identity and type; and then ComponentData, which defined the properties within a component type and was used to create flyweight instances. \u00a0This separation has been done away with. \u00a0By using annotation processors, all you need to do is create a sub-interface declaring the getter and setter methods for a property and everything else is done for you.<\/p>\n
That’s it. \u00a0It’s basically as easy as defining your data model for the component type and you barely have to worry about the implementation details. \u00a0Of course, I tried to put in customization options so it’s still possible to write your own property implementations and configure a mapping so they’re picked up by the annotation processor. \u00a0Attribute annotations are still fully supported, and now because the type definitions are even simpler they stand out as a useful documentation element as well.<\/p>\n