Game physics analysis and development — a quality-driven approach using the Entity Component Pattern

Abstract

The games industry is a broad, multi-discipline industry, which continues to grow in terms of revenue and cultural significance. Despite the accolades of this “recession-proof” industry, video game projects often fail either to deliver on time and on budget, or to deliver a high quality product. There are likely to be many reasons for this failure, but it may be possible to construct the software technologies used by the games industry in such a way that games development becomes quicker and easier. In order to determine if there are architectures which provide such a benefit, an analysis was carried out using software quality metrics as key indicators to determine the usability, maintainability, and re-usability factors of games technology.

Initial findings, based on online discourse and firebrand proponents, suggested that the entity component model (ECM) provides a well-engineered solution to the problems arising when developing games. However, the results of the analysis show that entity-component models do not produce inherently better metrics, and (in fact) some of the key arguments for the usage of Entity Component models consist of arguments against “straw-man” architectures that do not exist. It is possible that the ECM architecture provides benefits over current trends that do not employ an entity component model, but the results of the analysis in this report do not conclusively show that to be the case. Further directed investigation will be required to prove the importance of the ECM architecture in games development.