[Question] State Machines and Animation, or Complex Components about hecs

[Ralith]

Simple state machines in Rust are often represented with an enum that has a variant for each state. There's no reason not to use such thing in/as a hecs component.

Notions of inactivity or caching are difficult to consider out of context; as a general rule of thumb, prefer to avoid changing which components are had by large numbers of entities at high frequency, but don't bend over backwards to avoid changing them ever. Component sizes are generally not a problem. When in doubt, test your application's use case and profile; most likely ECS operations will never register in the performance of a real application that is doing other work like rendering or simulation.