Hi Maia, to answer your questions:
> less intuitive for OO programmers Entity systems do not use inheritance (well, dtEntity does, components can form an inheritance structure) and do less encapsulation than traditional object systems. But once you understand the basic idea it is very nice to have all functionality of one sort bundled away in an entity system. For example look at the sound system: All sound related stuff is in the SoundSystem object and the components it holds. You can easily and efficiently iterate over all sound components because they are held in a central data structure. No other part of the system needs to know about sounds. You can unload or start the sound system during run time, no restart or recompile needed. I think all this flexibility makes it worth to move away from inheritance based systems or traditional object-stored component systems. About using less ref_ptrs: Objects referenced by ref_ptrs must be created with new() on the heap and can not be held by memory managers like boost::pool. So not using them makes the system more flexible. You can do your own memory management for components, which can be important for speed-critical parts. > Also, I am not sure if it is working with VR Juggler (for CAVE configuration, > etc.), allows devices integration through VRPN, networking. Could you tell if > it does ? If OSG can do it then dtEntity can do it. dtEntity is simply a framework for controlling the OSG scene graph. While there is some setup code for getting an osgViewer started and registering to keyboard/mouse events, you can choose to not use that code and do your individual setup that maybe only uses parts of dtEntity. About osgCal3: I have written a simple entity system that currently only allows starting and stopping animations from JavaScript or C++, also attaching mesh nodes to animation bones. I will commit it to the dtEntity trunk when I return to work on wednesday, ok? Cheers, Martin ------------------ Read this topic online here: http://forum.openscenegraph.org/viewtopic.php?p=47361#47361 _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
