OK. Finally got something I’m ready to show.

My game is an attempt at a Kriegsspiel. A 19th century wargame that emphasized realistic issues that came up in battle. Mine at least will try to take into account proper size scales, lines of supply and communication, how long orders take to arrive, and be executed, etc

I’ve got the hex map editor working and have basic movement and some commands working. Next up will be line of sight for identifying enemy units, and Scouts bringing back delayed observations of enemy units. That sort of thing. Then battle!

So it’s been fun and a good learning experience if nothing else! I’ll be happy to open up the code if there someone other than me interested in this sort of thing…

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Steve

For whoever is interested, I’m invited to this Elixir Wizards podcast episode discussing ECS and Ecspanse: ECS / Game Development with Elixir vs. Python, JavaScript, React with Dorian Iacobescu & Daniel Luu | SmartLogic

Thanks. I think Ecspanse and ECSx try to solve the same “problem” but in different ways. I even mentioned ECSx as an alternative to Ecspanse in my Medium article.

Still, to try to answer your question, I think ECSx is more straightforward to get started with. You have generators and every component holds a single value. You can then query the individual components by their entity ID or as a list. But I think their guides section explains it better than I could.

On the other hand, Ecspanse has a bit more complicated approach, but I would say also offers more flexibility as the game becomes more complex. I would mention just a few of them:

• complex queries across multiple components, entities, and relationships
• out-of-the-box bidirectional entities relationships to make it easy to work with trees of entities, but especially with collections
• component templates and tags - to handle component collections and polymorphism.

You can find some more details and examples in the Medium article.

Thanks!
So yes. The map editor part stores the maps in Postgres. But I export them to JSON files to load in the game. They are loaded into Ecspanse and stored globally so multiple games can use them and not require separate copies.

And yes the map is BablylonJS and LiveView for the rest. I’m trying to keep the BabylonJs stuff as simple as possible for the game. It just renders the maps, knows how to draw units, and reports on what items get clicked on.

LiveView handles the UI state, and sends orders into Ecspanse, and when I get notifications from the Projections I just push the unit data into BabylonJS through a LiveView hook.

I will keep you in the loop for sure. Just couple of more features and I will work on getting it deployed… same old story lol. Thanks for the library and support!

New release v0.10.0

Introduces the introduces Ecspanse.Snapshot module to enable custom save and load solutions.

Check the new guide for some implementation ideas. And of course, let me know what you think