> Hardly any game needs "thousands of interacting entities" though (outside of special subsystems like particle systems).
This is an example of survivorship bias. How many ambitious game concepts have collapsed under performance/architecture issues that lead to productivity-killing refactoring? Impossible to say, but no doubt many.
> Arguably, ECS makes it harder to incrementally build a game by adding features, because you need to put more effort into designing the data layout upfront.
OOP bakes these decisions into the inheritance hierarchy, which ends up being more thorny than adding a component, or migrating an existing component's schema. ECS will make it straightforward to determine which Systems will be affected when a particular Component's schema is altered.
This is an example of survivorship bias. How many ambitious game concepts have collapsed under performance/architecture issues that lead to productivity-killing refactoring? Impossible to say, but no doubt many.
> Arguably, ECS makes it harder to incrementally build a game by adding features, because you need to put more effort into designing the data layout upfront.
OOP bakes these decisions into the inheritance hierarchy, which ends up being more thorny than adding a component, or migrating an existing component's schema. ECS will make it straightforward to determine which Systems will be affected when a particular Component's schema is altered.