Unreal Minimum Viable Flecs
Minimum viable Flecs entity component system implementation in Unreal Engine.
Intended as a super simple starting point / reference for using Flecs in Unreal.
- Flecs v3.2.12 & Unreal Engine 5.4
- Simple
- It does a thing
- ISM based entity rendering
- Uses the Flecs c++ API
- Flecs Explorer integration
- Basic c++ entity <--> blueprint communication example
Huge thans to Red J for his flecs space battle tutorial, check it out if you want a deeper dive
Demo: Corn gun
Shoot to spawn corn entities that grow.
Look at the corn entity in game do display it's current growth value.
Open Flecs Explorer to inspect entities
Why
Sometimes you need an ECS to make heavy stuff work performance-wise, Unreal doesn't have one built-in.
Mass is still experimental (but if you want to use it check out this)
Flecs is a well built performant solution for doing ECS used by ConfettiFX's The Forge who are powering Bethesda's next-gen game Starfield and a bunch of other projects.
Flecs has great documentation and an active community where you can ask your questions
It's hard to find starting points that are simple.
Updating to newer flecs releases
If there are no breaking changes all you need to do is replace
flecs.h and
flecs.c
With the updated .h and .c files from the Flecs Github repo and comment out #define flecs_STATIC On the first line of flecs.h.
After a rebuild you should be good to go.