I’m relatively new to ECS, and I’m currently working on a project where I’m trying to move a significant part of the simulation and gameplay into Mass.
I’m running into an architectural question: to keep responsibilities separated, I’m ending up with multiple specialized processors. For example: Movement → Behaviors → Collision → Responses → Destruction/VFX.
The concern is that some of these processors need to iterate over essentially the same entities/chunks again.
For those of you who have used Mass extensively, especially on larger projects, what approach has worked better in practice?
Do you prefer smaller, specialized processors even when that means multiple passes over the same entities, or do you tend to combine related work into larger processors to reduce the number of iterations?
I understand that sequential iteration over contiguous data can be relatively cheap, and that cache behavior, data access patterns, dependencies, and parallelization may matter more than simply counting iterations. But I’d be interested in hearing where people with real Mass experience have found the practical balance between modularity and performance.
Thanks in advance.