Previous Posts The Game Entity – Part I, A Retrospect The Game Entity – Part II, The Life Cycle and Processing Architecture The Game Entity – Part III, Components The Game Entity – Part IV, Game Systems
The Artemis framework inherits the concept of Entities representing bags of Components, but it does away with the OO concept of encapsulating behaviour within the components. Instead, it adopts a data-driven design involving the separation of the data and logic of each component. In essence, the Components serve as little more than bags of data. They have no update function, no internal logic, just getter and setter functions to expose their current values. The logic is instead encapsulated in the Systems that accompany the entities and components.
There are buckets of great articles out there explaining the entity/component game design paradigm from different perspectives, and it’s the kind of concept where your understanding really benefits from a broad exposure. Below is just a handful of the ones I’ve found useful in my adventures. You can, of course, find plenty more by Googling “entity component game”.