[A while back](https://www.mikecann.blog/portfolio/projects/unity-ashteroids-ash-framework-in-unity/) I decided to scratch an itch and see if [Richard Lord's Ash Entity Framework](https://www.ashframework.org/) could be ported to Unity. Well I was pleasantly surprised that it did port quite easily (with some help from David Arno's .NET port) and worked well enough that I could also port [Richard's Asteroids game over to Unity](https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids) too.



Since then I have had a few people contact me interested in using the port for their own projects so I decided to give it a little more love and polish.

## Part 1 - Separation

First things first was to split the Ash library from the Asteroids example project so you dont have to include the entire Asteroids port in every single one of your games (madness). So now the Unity Ash project can be found here:

[https://github.com/mikecann/Unity-Ash](https://github.com/mikecann/Unity-Ash)

..and the Asteroids project (which uses the Untity-Ash project) lives here:

[https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids](https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids)

Now all that you need to do to is to clone (or include as submodule) Unity-Ash into your game's Assets folder and you should be good to go, simples!

## Part 2 - GetComponents

Next up was performance. I knew that the performance of Unity-Ash was the biggest stumbling block and unfortunately it seemed like a fairly fundamental one thanks to some holes in the Unity API (more on that later). However, I knew there were a few low-hanging-performance-fruits I could pick that should speed up things a bit.

To experiment with things I setup a separate Unity project for the performance tests and included [Unity-Ash from GitHub](https://github.com/mikecann/Unity-Ash).

[![2014-12-10_09-30-51](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_09-30-51-1024x618.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_09-30-51.png)

The key performance bottleneck in Unity-Ash is the way the code checks for component additions and removals. Dynamic component addition and removal is key to how Ash functions and in AS3 because it was all custom code we could just fire an event when a component is added or removed from an Entity. Because Unity-Ash tries to piggyback on top of Unity's existing Entity (GameObject) / Component architecture we dont actually have access to the GameObject source and thus cant trigger events when a component is added or removed.

The solution I came up with is to add a component to each GameObject which acts like the Entity. It is responsible for checking to see if components have been added or removed, to do this it gets a list of all the components in the GameObject each frame and compares against its internal cache to see if any have been added or removed. This solution works well, however you can probably see the performance hit involved with getting a list of components from Unity for each GameObject, each frame will likely be quite high.

Because this listing of components was so crucial to performance I decided to write some tests to see what is the fastest way of doing that:

```
public class GetComponentTests : MonoBehaviour
{
	public int iterations = 10000000;
	public int repeats = 3;

	public GameObject noComponents;
	public GameObject manyComponents;
	public List<Component> components;

	public void TestAll()
	{
		components = new List<Component>();
		TestHelpers.Execute(iterations, repeats, "Empty Function", TestEmpty);
		TestHelpers.Execute(iterations, repeats, "Get Components With No Components", NoComponentsGetComponents);
		TestHelpers.Execute(iterations, repeats, "Get Components With Many Components", ManyComponentsGetComponents);
		TestHelpers.Execute(iterations, repeats, "Get Components With No Components List", NoComponentsGetComponentsList);
		TestHelpers.Execute(iterations, repeats, "Get Components With Many Components List", ManyComponentsGetComponentsList);

		Debug.Log("components " + components.Count);
	}

	public void TestEmpty()
	{
	}

	public void NoComponentsGetComponents()
	{
		noComponents.GetComponents<Component>();
	}

	public void ManyComponentsGetComponents()
	{
		manyComponents.GetComponents<Component>();
	}

	public void NoComponentsGetComponentsList()
	{
		noComponents.GetComponents<Component>(components);
	}

	public void ManyComponentsGetComponentsList()
	{
		manyComponents.GetComponents<Component>(components);
	}
}
```

I run each of these 10 million times then repeat 3 times and average:

1. "TestEmpty" is my control test test to get a sense of the cost of simply calling an empty function. That averaged to 0ms elapsed
2. "NoComponentsGetComponents" I test getting a list of components when the GameObject is empty (other than Transform), that averaged to 22ms.
3. "ManyComponentsGetComponents" I test getting a list of components when there are 20 components (plus Transform) to see what the cost of getting additional components would be, that averaged to 35ms.
4. "NoComponentsGetComponentsList" is the same as 2) except I avoid an internal memory allocation my passing in a List to populate the return with, that averaged to 5ms.
5. "ManyComponentsGetComponentsList" is the same as 3) except I pass in the List again, that averaged to 15ms.

So in summary, I learned its much faster if I pass in a list to GetComponents, which makes sense as I avoid the memory allocation associated with returning a new array each time. As a result I folded this performance improvement into Unity-Ash.

## Part 3 - Unity vs Ash

These tests are all well and good but 10 million iterations of GetComponents in standalone is probably an unlikely use case in the standard game so in addition I wanted to test what the actual performance hit you would get if you used Unity-Ash in a game instead of the standard Unity way.

To test this I set up another scene that creates and updates 5,000 asteroids on the screen.

[![upout](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/upout.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/upout.jpg)

I time how long they create then I count how many frames I get in 10 seconds of updating them. Each asteroid has a 2D rigid body and a very simple controller script that wraps the Asteroids position on the screen:

[![2014-12-10_10-15-54](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-15-54.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-15-54.png)

```
public class AsteroidController : MonoBehaviour
{
	private Bounds bounds;

	void Awake()
	{
		var size = Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(new Vector2(Screen.width, Screen.height));
		bounds = new Bounds(Vector3.zero, new Vector3(size.x * 2, size.y * 2));
	}

	void Update()
	{
		if (transform.position.x < bounds.min.x)
		{
			transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x + bounds.size.x, transform.position.y, transform.position.z);
		}
		if (transform.position.x > bounds.max.x)
		{
			transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x - bounds.size.x, transform.position.y, transform.position.z);
		}
		if (transform.position.y < bounds.min.y)
		{
			transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, transform.position.y + bounds.size.y, transform.position.z);
		}
		if (transform.position.y > bounds.max.y)
		{
			transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, transform.position.y - bounds.size.y, transform.position.z);
		}
	}
}
```

This was the base test and it took about 440ms to create 5000 asteroids and processed 83 frames over 10 seconds (8.3FPS).

Now I had my base I decided to setup the same scenario but using Unity-Ash to drive the updates. So now the Asteroid looks like this:

[![2014-12-10_10-19-42](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-19-42.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-19-42.png)

Notice that there is no controller for the Asteroid, now all the update logic happens in a system:

```
public class MovementSystem : SystemBase
{
	private Bounds bounds;
	private NodeList nodes;

	public MovementSystem()
	{
		var size = Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(new Vector2(Screen.width, Screen.height));
		bounds = new Bounds(Vector3.zero, new Vector3(size.x * 2, size.y * 2));
	}

	override public void AddToGame(IGame game)
	{
		nodes = game.GetNodeList<MovementNode>();
	}

	override public void Update(float time)
	{
		var cam = Camera.main;
		for (var node = (MovementNode)nodes.Head; node != null; node = (MovementNode)node.Next)
		{
			var transform = node.Transform;
			var rigidbody = node.Rigidbody;

			if (transform.position.x < bounds.min.x)
			{
				transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x + bounds.size.x, transform.position.y, transform.position.z);
			}
			if (transform.position.x > bounds.max.x)
			{
				transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x - bounds.size.x, transform.position.y, transform.position.z);
			}
			if (transform.position.y < bounds.min.y)
			{
				transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, transform.position.y + bounds.size.y, transform.position.z);
			}
			if (transform.position.y > bounds.max.y)
			{
				transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, transform.position.y - bounds.size.y, transform.position.z);
			}
		}
	}

	override public void RemoveFromGame(IGame game)
	{
		nodes = null;
	}
}
```

The update logic is functionally exactly the same as the AsteroidController except its now contained within a system.

This time it took 595ms to create the Asteroids and we processed 33 frames over 10 seconds (3.3FPS).

So immediately you can see there is a large performance hit in using Ash-Unity over regular Unity (8.3FPS compared to 3.3FPS). To confirm that it was the extra overhead of checking for new components on each asteroid rather than the internal updating mechanism of the Systems in Ash I decided to turn off checking for component updates..

[![2014-12-10_10-40-02](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-40-02.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-40-02.png)

Sure enough the frame rate went back up (in fact higher!) than the Unity update rate of 8.3FPS to 8.6FPS.

So with this in mind I decided to add an option to the Entity component that lets you choose how often it checks for new components:

[![2014-12-10_10-42-02](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-42-02.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-10_10-42-02.png)

The reasoning is that its actually quite rare that you change the components after the initial creation of the object (at least that's what I found) and thus by reducing the number of times the Entity component checks for updates we should be able to increase the performance.

Sure enough, when set to "Every Other Frame" the framerate goes up to 4.5FPS then set to "Every 10 Frames" it goes up to 7.4 FPS. The final setting "If Component Count Changes" attempts to skip the iteration of the components by comparing the number of components against the previous frame, this results in 7.5 FPS.

So the short of the long is that you can get the same as or higher FPS using Unity-Ash so long as you know beforehand how often you are going to be added or removing components. If you have entities that is likely never to have components added or removed then set it to update "Never" and enjoy great FPS with the power of using Ash.

Just as an addendum to this, I have submitted a feature request to Unity to add in events to GameObject that we can listen to that are fired when components are added or removed, this would obviously remove 99.9% of these performance issues from Unity Ash so I would love your votes:

[https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/componentadded-slash-removed-events-on-gameobject](https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/componentadded-slash-removed-events-on-gameobject)

As a final step in the upgrade process I looked at what more radical changes we could make to the framework by taking advantage of Generics and some other features that C# gives us that were lacking in AS3, you can check those out towards the bottom of the readme: [https://github.com/mikecann/Unity-Ash](https://github.com/mikecann/Unity-Ash)

Well that's it for now, I hope you enjoy the improvements, please to let me know if you think its worth carrying on development, I would love to work on it some more but I have games to write!

I decided to take a break from the [game development](https://www.mikecann.blog/myprojects/mr-nibbles-3d/mr-nibbles-3d-menus-obscuring/) today to scratch an itch I had had for a while.



Its no secret that im a fan of Entity-Component systems having used various flavours of them for years. My particular favourite however is found in [Richard Lord's Ash Framework](https://www.ashframework.org/). I have used it on numerous projects including my [3-game prototype challenge](/posts/the-three-game-challenge/).



Ash Framework however is written for the Flash platform. Though there are ports for other platforms, no one has yet done one for Unity. It gets talked about on the [Ash mailing list](https://groups.google.com/group/ash-framework?hl=en) every now and then but often dismissed as either impossible or pointless as Unity already has an Entity framework built into it.

Well after a [recent discussion](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/ash-framework/NrC5dQyBRkY) I decided I wanted to have a go at it anyway. It turns out its actually not that hard to implement.

Starting off with [David Arno's .Net port of Ash](https://github.com/DavidArno/Ash.NET) I wrote two small classes that wrap the [Ash Engine](https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids/blob/master/Assets/Ash/Unity/AshGame.cs) and [Ash Entity](https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids/blob/master/Assets/Ash/Unity/AshEntity.cs).

Ash Entity is the key piece to the puzzle. You add it as a component to your game object:

[![screenshot_003](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screenshot_003.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screenshot_003.png)

It then checks to see which Unity components have been added or removed each frame and updates the Ash Entity reference. Its simple but it works! It even includes the default Unity Components so that means you don't need a base "AshComponent".

The AshEngine serves as the root of the hierarchy. So long as you place entities below it they will be able to find the engine. This makes it really easy and convenient to create scenes at design time and have them work when you hit play:

[![screenshot_005](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screenshot_005.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screenshot_005.png)

From that simple foundation I decided to have a go at porting the entire of Richard's Asteroids example over to Unity. I was surprised at how little issues I ran into. You can give it a play here:

[/projects/UnityAshteroids/UnityAshteroids.html](/projects/UnityAshteroids/UnityAshteroids.html)
**Use arrow keys to move and space to shoot.**

It all works surprisingly well. [The code](https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids) is really clean and very simmilar to the original.

The only changes I needed to make from the .Net port was to change some "internals" to "public" and changed the type of the update variable from double to float as Unity uses floats for everything not doubles.

Instead of manually defining the components in "EntityCreator" I use Unity's prefab system which makes it really nice and easy to edit properties in the inspector in the editor:

[![screenshot_004](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screenshot_004-1024x685.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/screenshot_004.png)

Then load them the usual Unity way using Resources.Load().

Systems are just pure code and added to the Engine as usual:

[code lang="csharp"]
public class Asteroids : AshGame
{
private EntityCreator creator;
private GameConfig config;

    void Awake()
    {
    	creator = new EntityCreator(this);
    	config = new GameConfig();

    	var size = Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(new Vector2(Screen.width, Screen.height));
    	config.Bounds = new Bounds(Vector3.zero, new Vector3(size.x*2, size.y*2));

    	Engine.AddSystem(new WaitForStartSystem(creator), SystemPriorities.PreUpdate);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new GameManagerSystem(creator, config), SystemPriorities.PreUpdate);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new MotionControlSystem(), SystemPriorities.Update);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new GunControlSystem(creator), SystemPriorities.Update);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new BulletAgeSystem(creator), SystemPriorities.Update);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new DeathThroesSystem(creator), SystemPriorities.Update);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new MovementSystem(config), SystemPriorities.Move);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new CollisionSystem(creator), SystemPriorities.ResolveCollisions);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new HudSystem(), SystemPriorities.Animate);
    	Engine.AddSystem(new AudioSystem(), SystemPriorities.Render);

    	creator.CreateWaitForClick();
    	creator.CreateGame();
    }

}  
[/code]

The changes to the Asteroids code in general are minimal. I use Unity's components wherever possible, so things like Position and Movement become Transform and Rigidbody2D. Rendering is taken care of by Unity so I didn't need any RenderingSystem or Display component.

The code is available on GitHub for your perusal: [https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids](https://github.com/mikecann/UnityAshteroids)

I was actually surprised I was able to get this all working without any problems. There are improvements that could be made:

## Performance of AshEntity

AshEntity is the core to the whole thing and unfortunately it probably isn't the most performant. For each entity in the game it checks every frame to see if any components were added or removed. It doesn't do this in the best possible way so there is definitely room to improve this.

## Sugar

There is plenty of room for syntax sugar thanks to the superior C# language over Actionscript 3\. NodeList could be made generic and a generic ListIteratingSystem could be developed and perhaps even a way of eliminating nodes altogether. Also retrieving components from Ash Entity could be made simpler by removing the need to pass in the type param when calling Entity.Get<>().

## Finite State Machines

As the .Net port does not include Richard's FSM code I worked around the problem by destroying and creating new prefabs. This works quite well as it allows you to use the inspector to visually design the prefabs however a nice addition would be some editor tools and code for FSMs in Unity.

## Unit Tests

I copied over the .Net tests from David's port and got them running in unity using Unity Test tools without any problems however my Ash Unity code isn't tested. There isn't much of it but it probably should be covered.

Well this is it! I have completed the third game in my [three game prototype challenge](/posts/the-three-game-challenge/). ([first game](/posts/the-three-game-challenge-part-1-lateshas-crib/), [second game](/posts/the-three-game-challenge-part-2-a-cunning-plan/))



With this one I wanted to try my hand at a very popular game genre at the moment, match-three. Because this is a rather simple style of game I thought it would be really easy and fast to make. Wrong. I spent hours without touching a keyboard trying to come up with some novel twist on the genre.

I toyed around with a gem dropping mechanic but that didn't work so well, then I thought about how someone interacts with match-three games on mobile, by dragging the icons around. So I decided to base my game play on dragging gems around until they make a match.

I originally wanted a "mindless" match-three game like Montezuma, one where you play it as fast as you can without thinking too much about the moves. As I started developing the game play for this one however it seemed to fit a puzzle like game better so that's what I ended up with.

[![screenshot_01](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_01-300x219.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_01.png) [![screenshot_02](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_02-300x219.png)

](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_02.png)[![screenshot_03](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_03-300x219.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_03.png) [![screenshot_04](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_04-300x219.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_04.png)

Anyways give it a go and let me know what you think:

[Play The Family Jewels

](/projects/jewels)

This one took a little less time at the others at 31hours over 7 days, as per the other two I recorded my time spent:

17th April
11:00 - 12:00
15:00-18:00

20th April
10:00-12:00

21st April
13:00-17:00

22nd April
11:00-13:00
14:00-16:00
20:00-21:00

23rd April
11:00-16:00

24th April
11:00-16:00
18:00-21:00

25th April
11:00-12:00

Well that's the end of my challenge! Im surprised I managed to do it. A little over a week per game seems like hardly any time at all but having that time restriction really is good as it helps to limit your scope, preventing the game from ballooning out into something that could otherwise have taken months and still not have been any fun to play.

As for the tools I used. I used Richard Lord's excellent [Ash Game Framework](https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ashframework.org%2F&ei=sQt5UeOlHsam0wXF74DYBQ&usg=AFQjCNGf9MWL8YXaduF6F9pn2bsVQNDzGQ&sig2=VA_kHUtU14g4k2q5xISD3w&bvm=bv.45645796,d.d2k) to develop them all alongside Starling with Feathers on top of Flash for the rendering. For rapidly prototyping games they have been excellent. Now im more familiar with Ash I may write a post or two about how to go about structuring certain parts of a game in an enitity-component like manner.

But for the next week or so I need to finish my packing before my [mammoth trip to Central and South America](/posts/my-2013/).

Another week, another game completed as part of [my three prototype games challenge](/posts/the-three-game-challenge/) ([part one](/posts/the-three-game-challenge-part-1-lateshas-crib/), [part three](/posts/the-three-game-challenge-part-3-the-family-jewels/)) I set myself at the start of this month.



For this one I decided on a type of game that I have been wanting to make for a while, a turn based strategy game. Many moons ago I used to play a J2ME (shudder) game called Ancient Empires. It was a great little game with lots of depth and replayabliltiy and I think it deserved a remake of sorts.

So here is "A Cunning Plan":

[![screenshot_16](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_16-300x224.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_16-300x224.png) [![screenshot_13](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_13-300x222.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_13-300x222.png)
[![screenshot_14](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_14-300x220.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_14-300x220.png) [![screenshot_15](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_15-300x225.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_15-300x225.png)

You can play the game here:

[Play A Cunning Plan](/projects/acunningplan)

This game was far more complex to create than [Latesha's Crib](/posts/the-three-game-challenge-part-1-lateshas-crib/) and hence I spent about 43 hours over the last 9 days making this one.

I was able to save some time by reusing parts of the rendering and hopping logic from Latesha's Crib. As usual I used the  [Ash Framework](https://www.ashframework.org/) with Adobe Starling and Feathers. To code the AI for the computer player I used [Tim Conkling's Excellent Godmode Behaviour Trees](https://github.com/tconkling/godmode-as3) library which is truly an excellent AS3 library. The way Behaviour Trees work is really cool, I strongly recommend checking them out if you are going to design any sort of AI.

Special thanks go to [Mike Rigby](https://www.facebook.com/mikepaulrigby) for helping with play testing and [Ian Callaghan](https://www.facebook.com/ian.t.callaghan) for suggesting I check out Behaviour Trees :)

Let me know what you think of it, if people are feeling it then I may turn it into a full-blown mobile game!

Again I recorded the my time spent making this one, heres the log:

4th April
9:30am - 2pm
3pm - 7pm

5th April
9:30am - 10:30am

6th April
12:00pm - 4pm (-1 for josh, -1 for lunch &amp; spanish)

7th April
2pm - 19:30pm

8th April
1pm - 3:30pm (-1 spanish and lunch)
4pm - 6pm

9th April
3pm - 7pm

10th April
12pm - 7pm

11th April
9am - 10am
1pm - 6pm;

12th April
10am - 1:30pm

![](/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/c05c1aa4a34153cda98d2ed3964498f6.png)

Well as announced [in my last post](/posts/my-2013/) im going to be spending most of this year travelling around various parts of the world. I'm leaving on the 7th on May so I have about a month left before I go so I have been thinking on what small project I can do in the meantime to keep me out of mischief.



I had a great idea for a game which I may write about in a later post but decided that perhaps now may not be the time to make it. So instead what I have decided to do is create a number of prototype games, three to be precise then let you guys decide which one I should take further.

The rules are the games all have to be designed as if they are going to work on mobile so that means only touch based controls. Ill be using Adobe AIR with Ash for all these prototypes so ill make sure that they all run in the browser with PC based controls too.

Im also going to get myself another ground rule. I can only use the free [Lost Garden Planet Cute](https://www.lostgarden.com/2007/05/dancs-miraculously-flexible-game.html) assets.

[![main](/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/main.png)](/posts/the-three-game-challenge/attachment/main-9/)

I hope that this limitation will mean I don't spend too much time worrying about the tech and how it looks and instead concentrate on what has traditionally been tough for me, making it fun!

Ill be updating regularly on my progress and then throw a vote out at the end of it and see which one people like the most, wish me luck!

[Last October](/posts/try-harder-2012-slides/) I was fortunate enough to attend the excellent [Try Harder](https://www.tryharder.org.uk/) conference for the second time.[ I have spoken before](/posts/try-harder-2012/) about how inspirational the event is where every attendant must give a talk on something they are passionate about. One of the talks was by David Wagner's and was on 'The Value of Tinkering' and it inspired me to[ tinker with TypeScript](/posts/tinkering-with-typescript/) which led to my [Recursive Chrome Extension](/posts/personal-project/recursive/).



Before I go any further I should mention that there is a [Try Harder 'Level Up'](https://www.tryharder.org.uk/level-up-2013/) session taking place in April that is open to new attendees, I thoroughly recommend you check it out!

Following on in the same 'Tinkering' vein I have decided to investigate an AS3 library by another Try Harder attendee [Richard Lord](https://www.richardlord.net/blog):

[![logo](/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/logo.png)](/posts/tinkering-with-ash/attachment/logo-4/)

What is Ash? Well direct from the [Ash Website:](https://www.ashframework.org/)

> Ash is a high-performance entity system framework for game development.
>
> An entity system is a way to organise the code for a game that is efficient for both code execution and code management. It uses composition rather than inheritance for sharing features between game objects and uses a data-oriented approach to separate the game state from the game logic. This makes it much easier to manage the code and to manage the game state.
> Im not going to go into the details too much of why composition over inheritance is a good idea as Richard has already done a much better job than I ever could in these two posts:

- [What is an entity system framework for game development?](https://www.richardlord.net/blog/what-is-an-entity-framework)
- [Why use an entity system framework for game development?](https://www.richardlord.net/blog/why-use-an-entity-framework)
  If you haven't got a clue what im talking about when I say Entity or Component I strongly recommend checking out his posts first.

The reason why Ash has piqued my interest is because for the last three years I have been working with Entity-Component systems for games but in a totally different way. The way I have been using and developing started with the Push Button Engine (PBE) method and later expanded out to include Dependency Injection culminating in the [Swft Framework](/posts/swft-dependency-injection-component-based-game-framework/).

Ill give one example of why am starting to fall in love with Ash:

In PBE and Swft the components contain data and functions. They can also declare dependencies (via [Inject]) which are automatically fulfilled when a component is added to an Entity. The functions in the component are able to act on their own data, other components and interact with the game as a whole.

One problem with this method is that components are largely tied to their entity and once attached aren't really free be removed or added. The reason is because other component may have dependencies that depend on that component being part of the Entity. Removing the component will cause the game to crash. This becomes a problem when you want to enable a certain chunk of functionality for a certain time then disable it, what you tend to end up doing is adding the component at Entity creation time then inside of it toggling its behaviour with a boolean.

In Ash components are pure data with the bulk of the functionality being contained within systems. Sure you can have functions in a component but they **only act on their own data**. There are no hard dependencies between components. What this means is that components are much more free to be added and removed from Entities. So how do component function together then? Well that's where Systems come in.

Systems are classes that contain the logic that makes up your game. When added to the engine they grab one or many lists of Nodes. A Node simply defines a collection of components that must exist on an Entity. In effect it declares the dependencies that this System needs to operate. What's neat about this is that this list of nodes is constantly changing as components are added and removed from entities. The Ash Engine manages this all for you so all the system need do is iterate over the linked list of Nodes each frame and execute its logic.

Systems also must not declare dependencies between each other. This rule means you don't end up with large dependency hierarchies between Systems. This frees up systems to be added and removed from the Engine with no side effects! This is rather remarkable as it lets you do crazy things that you couldn't normally do when there are many dependencies between systems. For example your game could have a Blitting based rendering system, then halfway through a running the game you could swap that out that System and replace it with a Starling based rendering System!

Thus far I have only spent a limited amount of time tinkering with Ash but I am having a whole lot of fun. I have started work on a little game to experiment around with the framework. At the same time I have been exploring [Starling](https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CD8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgamua.com%2Fstarling%2F&ei=yiEdUazkL-uX0QWNz4EI&usg=AFQjCNHKL4BaeidkUlpmw48eBMwyhwG2tw&bvm=bv.42452523,d.d2k), the hardware accelerated 2D rendering framework built on Stage3D. Thus far I have produced this little map editor:

<object width="650" height="650" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="wmode" value="direct" /><param name="src" value="/projects/Mash/01/MashWeb.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="pluginspage" value="https://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /><embed width="650" height="650" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="/projects/Mash/01/MashWeb.swf" wmode="direct" quality="high" pluginspage="https://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></object>
Click to place a block, shift and click to remove, scroll mouse to change block type and hold control and click to zoom in / out.

Its only a tech demo at the moment and as such hasnt got any game play elements. Im not entirely sure what to turn it into but as a platform for tinkering with Ash its been great.

Its too early to share the code at the moment but if you would like to see how some Ash code looks I strongly recommend you check out [Richard's Asteroids example on GitHub](https://github.com/richardlord/Asteroids). I was really quite taken aback by how neat and modular the code is. The example is provided in 4 different flavours, one using RobotLegs one with Starling one with SwiftSuspenders and one with no dependencies at all. The fact that the code still works and looks simple in all the examples really demonstrates the versatility of the framework :)