Tweening In Entitas

In my EntitasCoverShooter project I tween position of some Entities. NOTE: This project is still incomplete as of August 13, 2016.

When I process the entities which have a PositionComponent, I check a custom useTween property. The result is good. Entities can tween or not tween the position and the system respects it. This solution was inspired by another Entitas sample project. I forget which one 😃 For now, I do all tweens at the same duration of 0.3f, but of course that could be stored in the component too.

As a side note, outside the scope of this post…

• I use the 3rdParty HOTween. I like it 😃
• I use UnityEngineReplacementUtility as an an experimental approach to include NO UnityEngine namespace types in my Entitas Components and Systems. Its working well so far. I mention it since its included in the snippet below, but not to generate discussion on it.
• My personal approach to Entias is to store data in Components, the process data in Systems, and to update GameObjects only in Controllers. The example below follows that convention.

In the ViewController.cs I do this;

if (!entity.position.useTween)
{
    ((GameObject)entity.view.gameObject).transform.position = UnityEngineReplacementUtility.Convert(entity.position.position);

}
else
{
    ((GameObject)entity.view.gameObject).transform.DOMove(UnityEngineReplacementUtility.Convert(entity.position.position), 0.3f);
}

Questions

1. What alternative approaches can there be to handle games with entities that sometimes tween and sometimes do not tween?

[aqaddoumi]

Okay, thanks for the answer, I will see how I will go about it and keep you guys updated 😃

[mzaks]

I would say it is a question of flexibility. By providing abstractions and hiding the state you can implement a very clean way of using the system. However it will push user into certain way of solving the problem. By exposing the state as components you can enable things like complex animation morphing. The developer who knows the animation of the game can write custom systems which can evaluate current animation state and decide how to proceed.