Well it seems that every step of ECS involves hours of looking for examples on the web and experimenting with them. I plan on making cheat sheets for the tasks I figured out so I don’t have to search again each time. At the moment they are on paper pinned to my cork board, but in time I hope to have all my code examples in one nice place.
The following clip is a sample of my map generation code which I made pre-ECS, so it converts the data to entities only after map is drawn. If I have some time, I will upgrade to improve, but for now it works and I want to move on to others parts of the game.
Next was experimenting with the best way to display units. I started with one roughly drawn unit in a couple directions just to test the code. Again the goal is to display thousands of unique units each doing their own thing. Below shows my progress using sprite sheets and simple sprite animation. It clocks in at ~40fps with 5000 units each performing separate pathfinding routines on my i5 3.2Ghz machine. No doubt this can be improved, but one step at a time.
Next steps will be to add towns and objects which units can interact with. I also want to work on a graphics tool to help create my sprites for when I need to give my programming brain a break and just creatively work on the graphics.
Mighty Beaver Studios 