This Repo is depricated

Please visit following repo https://github.com/mzaks/Entitas-Lang

Motivation

This project explores the posibility of a language designed for entity component system architecture. The code is stored as .ecs file and is transpiled to different platforms. The project is based on Xtext.

Early adopters

The project in current state is very early in development, however if you are brave early adopter, you have two options how you can try it out

N00b just want to play around

In this case please download this Ecplise package. And put the .jar files located in ECSEditorPlugins folder into your Eclipse dropins folder. For OSX users - Eclipse.app is a folder which you can open by right clicking on it and selecting "Show Package Contents." in Finder.

Now you can start Eclipse. After you defined the workspace location and closed the welcome screen, you will see the Eclipse Workbench. We have two options, create a new project or import. Let's start with create new project.

There are many ways how you can create a new project in Eclipse. I will describe the way which is simpler to explain. In application menu select File > New > Project... Than select General > Project

After you created a project right click on it in Package Explorer. Select New > File and enter a filename, which has .ecs extension. When you click on Finish you will see a prompt, asking you to convert your project to Xtext project.

Select yes and here we go. You can see your ECS-Lang editor with first error: mismatched input '<EOF>' expecting 'platform' Let's fix that by adding follwoing statement platform entitas_csharp_light.

entitas_csharp_light is the first platform which has a usable code generator. In order to trigger the code generation just save the file.

To make it a little bit more interesting let's add type alias and two components

If you are interested in the language grammer, please have a look at this walkthrough The entitas_csharp_light platform support only component definitions. Systems support, as descrined in the walk through, is planed for entitas_csharp.

Workflow for Unity3D

If you are working with Unity3D, you probably don't want to create a new project, because than you will have to copy the src-gen folder from your Eclipse project in to Unity project. Instead I would recomend doing following. Create a new folder in your Unity Assets folder, name it for example ecs.

Now switch to Eclipse and this time select File > Import... from application menu. Select General > Import Projects from File System or Archive And there, select the directory you just created in Assets folder.

This way you created a virtual link. When you create a new .ecs file in Eclipse

it will be located in the Unity Assets folder, same with the src-gen folder.

The shmup.ecs file represent the definition of all components for Entitas-Shmup project and can be found here (https://gist.github.com/mzaks/71a8ef5a6788b9ba0a13c50d0b97c080)

Developers looking into code generators and coverage of other platforms

You can download the same Ecplise package which I recomended before and try out to build the plugins directly. I plan to add a better explanation how to get started with writing code generators for other platforms. But for now just create an issue if you have a direct question.