ECS: Run-Time Component Store Initialisation and Entity Parsing

Okay so last night I finally started on changing the Component store to get rid of all the statics and instead have the vector of "Component Proxies" populated at run-time. This all went really well and I managed to get it up and running pretty quickly. This then left me with the rest of my evening to progress further with other improvements. 

Entity Class Naming Change

One thing I changed is that I have renamed the "Entity" class in my new ECS system to "EntityECS" and I will then derive this from a base Entity Interface class. This is so that in the future I could possibly implement a different EntityManager and that could maybe do the classic deep hierarchy approach to entities. I have already changed the EntityManager to "EntityManagerECS" and the JBEngine class has a IEntityManager Interface which you can set so this future improvement shouldn't be too difficult. 

Further on from this I've gone on to attempt to conquer the Entity Parsing for the new ECS

Entity Parsing from XML

I use a library for dealing with the underlying complexities of parsing XML in from a file. The layer I have built on top of this allows me to perform some handling code at the start and end of xml tags. Within each tag the library collects all the values and stores them in an attribute list that has a "name" and a "value". i.e. name="PosX" value="0.00" 
Here is the basic process I have implemented for creating entities.

1. When I get an <Entity> start tag I create a new entity.
2. When I hit a new component within this <Entity> tag I then use the component store which creates that component by it's name and adds it to the passed in Entity. 
   
3. The component store also returns a "BaseComponent" which I then use the overridden "Load" function to pass in all the values from the attributes list. Which sets the component up exactly as it was stored in the xml.

I was going to try and have the Load function deal with the xml but instead I thought it would just be easier to just use a stringstream and this could then just use the ">>" and "<<" operators for both the Load and Save Functions.

I will have to be careful that the Load and Save functions always remain in sync otherwise there could be a lot of data corruption going on. 

I really like this approach as it means that the class deals with it's own initialisation and nothing else needs to know about it.

So what's next?

Okay next I will be getting on with ensuring that all the load and save functions work for the components I already have. I will also be doing some refactoring as there are a lot of commented out functions and redundant code left over from when I used the old Entity System as a starting point.

Once I have done this I will then think about exactly what components I need to implement, and also to implement all this "Component Store" and Entity Parsing functionality for my ECS Systems.

Thanks :)