Data Oriented Design - what is it?

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Hi all,

I’m trying to wrap my head around data oriented design and I’m not getting the answers I want.
As far as I know, it’s using data components to make changes during runtime instead of the OOP approach, but that’s as far as I know.
Can someone give some reading material or video that gets to point of DoD?

Thanks

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i’m also interested.

Any time I read about this stuff it sounds big and fancy but from the scant practical examples I can find, it seems like you just put data into some sort of database and read from it.

I suppose there may be more of a real difference at the low-level. But I’m just a blueprinter so I only use the tools bequeathed upon me and don’t care too much about what magic happens below.

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If you are interested in data oriented programming for game development, I would recommend studying ECS, or the entity component system. If you are unfamiliar, (which I am no expert myself), it is the move to parallel-inheritance data design. It also converts everything into sized-blocks, which fit precisely into cpu-cache, eliminating cache-misses during execution of code.

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To me, Unity’s ECS is more akin to UE Actor Components. It’s not the same, but similar.

I could be wrong. Again, this all isn’t making sense.