After examining Zay-ES, its exampless, and other entity-systems related material, it seems to me that an entity systems (e.g. Zay-ES) is somewhat that makes the use of JMEs Controls unnecessary, effectively only exploiting the 3D scene graph and AppStates to represent the systems? Putting a Control on an entity would make things go out of control and not in an Entity System way?
Not really, a Control would use the information of the ES to e.g. start animations, move a character etc. (as all that has to happen on the update loop)
well…that doen’t really make sense.
I use controls on the “view” level, entities are on the “model” level.
For example, let’s say you have an entity that represent a character, with a HitPoint component.
If I want to display the hit points on screen, I’d probably use an app state that would collect the enetity, with its hitpoint component and display the value with a Bitmap text attached to the gui viewport.
Now if, for example, I want to make the bitmap text blink when the HP are low, I’d use a control on the bitmapText.
That’s purely in the view realm and the control wouldn’t have any interaction with the model realm (the entities). A control is appropriate here because it applies only to one spatial in the scene and has a limited life time.
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I see, thanks, Normen, Nehon, that makes sense!