Custom Engine support for ecsact language?

[Shadowblitz16]

First of all I would like to say this is a awesome project.

Also I would like to use then in my own game engine.
Can this support Custom Engines like stuff made in Silk.NET?

[zaucy]

Hey thanks for checking Ecsact out!

Yes custom engine or no-engine projects are supported although its a bit more work to get started. You'll mostly be working with the ecsact CLI to do code generation and build a shared library for the ecsact runtime based on your .ecsact files.

Here's a couple resources you might be interested in

• https://ecsact.dev/start/cli
• https://ecsact.dev/start/custom

I'm not very familiar with Silk.NET, but to get you started a bit I'd suggest generating some C# with ecsact codegen.

ecsact codegen example.ecsact --plugin=csharp

This will generate some C# files that end with *.ecsact.cs that represent each of your .ecsact files.

Similar can be done for creating the ecsact runtime shared library

ecsact build example.ecsact -r rt_entt -o your_ecsact_runtime

This should generate a shared library called your_ecsact_runtime.dll on windows and your_ecsact_runtime.so on linux.

NOTE: it is crucial that both codegen and runtime are built with the same ecsact files!

After building the runtime you'll have to do a little marshaling of the C API which can be quite involved. We've done it once for the unity integration and you can use it as inspiration https://github.com/ecsact-dev/ecsact_unity/blob/release/Runtime/EcsactRuntime.cs#L2695-L2700. I think at some point we might need to create a general wrapper that isn't unity specific to help out all you C# folks :)

One possibility (that we have not tried) is using a bindings generator on the ecsact runtime C headers (here: https://github.com/ecsact-dev/ecsact_runtime/tree/main/ecsact/runtime).

All that being said we are more than happy to help you further. Either keep posting here or give us a shout on our discord https://discord.gg/vKxQztg7gB