Writing ecs wrappers around not ecs code?

[Shadowblitz16]

I want to make a ecs wrapper around silk.net, but I am new to ecs and am unsure how people write ecs wrappers around existing non ecs code.

I also don't want to expose anything from silk so I was wondering whats the best way to go about doing it?

[friflo]

I assume you want to utilize the Graphics API's provided by Silk.NET. E.g. OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D or SDL.
So you can render 2D or 3D stuff on the screen.

So your intension is to write something like a 2D/3D engine.
The main approach of every game engine is providing the ability to build a scene (tree or flat). A scene is a container of general purpose objects. These objects may have coordinates, materials, meshes, physic properties and more. They also allow to connect custom code to do simulation and control rendering.

There are two major architecture patterns for doing this.
OOP and component based. Examples for OOP are Godot and Unreal. Unity is component based.
As ECS is a component based architecture. So you should search and look for API's using a component based approach.

[Shadowblitz16]

Yes but I was wondering how to write a Friflo ecs wrapper around it in a way that doesn't expose internals.

[Shadowblitz16]

I assume you want to utilize the Graphics API's provided by Silk.NET. E.g. OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D or SDL. So you can render 2D or 3D stuff on the screen.

So your intension is to write something like a 2D/3D engine. The main approach of every game engine is providing the ability to build a scene (tree or flat). A scene is a container of general purpose objects. These objects may have coordinates, materials, meshes, physic properties and more. They also allow to connect custom code to do simulation and control rendering.

There are two major architecture patterns for doing this. OOP and component based. Examples for OOP are Godot and Unreal. Unity is component based. As ECS is a component based architecture. So you should search and look for API's using a component based approach.

So basically the problem is most windowing api's like silk.net are blocking, and opengl and glfw are not thread safe.
The reason I am asking this is because ecs is more suited for looking over something and updating it through systems.
You can't do that with silk.net because silk.net is blocking and we needs to use events to do anything.

[RouderSky]

I'm working on something similar, using Friflo to encapsulate Unity, ensuring that ECS business code doesn't rely on any Unity-specific content. For the core code, I also aim to minimize dependencies, and if dependencies are necessary, I make sure to encapsulate them properly. The workload is significant because my project already has a substantial amount of code. One crucial aspect of writing code with ECS is data modeling—once the data modeling is done well, the logic becomes clear.