When writing software I like to do an implementation and then if we need to optimize it later, then we do that later. You don’t write software quickly if the first thing that you are doing is optimise first. When you hear the letters ‘ECS’ many people think about data oriented design and highly optimized processing of data. Yes, this is one possible reason for doing ECS, but it is not the primary reason that I’m using this design pattern.

It’s been a busy week. I’ve started three big things. First was starting to create an entity component system. I’m not going to talk about that much here, because it is nowhere near functional. I can create and destroy entities, and I can assign components to those entities. But there are no systems yet, which is a pretty much necessary part of an ECS, unless you just want to call it an EC!

It has been a bit of a week. I’ve only added about 6651 lines of code this week. Most of these lines are not code, but I’ll explain later.

First, we have to talk about uniforms. In the graphics world, the concept of a uniform is a very small bit of data that is used by a vertex or fragment shader to do a lot of work. For example, if we wanted to have a triangle rotating around the screen we could do all the math on the CPU and update the buffers that describe the triangle every frame. This is both a lot of math for a CPU to do, and also a lot of memory that has to be copied between the CPU memory subsystem and the GPU memory subsystem. These are different blocks of memory and are only connected by a slightly wet piece of string, typically called the PCIe bus by most people.

Productivity is always highest on day one when there are no problems to solve and no bugs to fix.

Well, I’ve decided to start up a little blog to discuss what I’ve been doing. I started this at about 10pm at night on the 15th February 2025. What is this project? Difficult to know at this point, but I have this little idea in my head that could become a game, or just a tool for others to be able to use, but I’d like it to be a fun thing to play with and therefore could become a game.