What’s next for Nomad?
If you were worried that I’d leave the topic here, fret not! I’ve still got a lot of goals with both my game engine and this series.
Fleshed-out examples
Many ECS explanations online (including mine!) tend to explain simplified concepts that make composition seem like the easiest and most logical design pattern ever. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually implementing even a simple game, the devil is often in the details and ECS design can quickly become difficult to reason about.
To try to combat this, I’m in the process of creating an open source and simplified version of Nomad to accompany this series. The goal here isn’t performance (although it might come up), but instead to conquer the more difficult conceptual challenges with game design using ECS.
For those of you who have been waiting and emailing me about it, expect it to be released next week.
Benchmarks
Building an ECS engine is a task that I’ve found is often tackled by people who enjoy small optimizations (see AoS vs SoA). Despite many of my blog posts talking about performance (sometimes in relative depth), I have yet to provide anything more than theoretical performance increases. I’d love spend some time learning how to properly benchmark my engine and game and build some simulations that would allow for data to back up the theoretical performance considerations in my previous posts.
Branching out
In addition to the game engine stuff, I’d love to learn more about rendering, physics, and networking. I think it would be really cool to explore all of these topics and write blog posts about them!
Self-hosting
Moving my blog to Medium was a great decision for me — I’m always hesitant to put myself out there and having a platform that advertises for me has been a big blessing to have my posts reach more people. As I get further along in this project, I’d like to also drive some traffic to my own site, savas.ca. My plan is to continue posting to Medium, but slowly add more functionality to pages like savas.ca/nomad. While it’s a very lofty goal, I’d love to be able to create some interactive tutorials like Amit Patel over at Red Blog Games.
Help me out!
If you’ve made it this far you’re probably one of the more dedicated readers — I’d love to hear from you what you’d like to see most as this project moves forward. Leave a comment here or shoot me an email at niko@savas.ca!
