Well, I'm not a professional gamedev, nor did I ever do much multiplayer code, but:
1) AFAIR, the ECS patterns family[0] originally came from MMORPG world, and boiled down to designing your game state to work well with relational databases;
2) Around 6 years ago, while toying with yet another (see [0]) take on ECS for a simple game, and wondering how to query stuff efficiently, it dawned on me that the code I'm writing is basically implementing spacial indices and other such concepts from relational DB world. At that point, I thought to myself, "why continue wasting time Greenspunning[1] a database for the internal state, when I could use a real one?", and followed by "you know what I really need next? An in-memory SQLite database to store all my runtime game state!".
I didn't get very far with my experiment due to constraints of adult life, but I did prove that I can build a basic Roguelike skeleton (2D tile map, entities, walls, collisions) while storing all state in SQLite, and have it run at 60 FPS with half of the frame time to spare for other things, on moderately powerful machine (as of 6 years ago), all without too much optimization (Common Lisp with FFI bindings to libsqlite3 + a simple RLU cache in front of queries).
So it's not at all a stupid idea, IMO :). I would test it further if I had the time.
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[0] - The term means different things to different people. I've seen at least three distinct gamedev design patterns claiming the name ECS for themselves, all conceptually incompatible with each other. More, if you also consider "whatever Unity/Unreal/Godot/... calls ECS".
1) AFAIR, the ECS patterns family[0] originally came from MMORPG world, and boiled down to designing your game state to work well with relational databases;
2) Around 6 years ago, while toying with yet another (see [0]) take on ECS for a simple game, and wondering how to query stuff efficiently, it dawned on me that the code I'm writing is basically implementing spacial indices and other such concepts from relational DB world. At that point, I thought to myself, "why continue wasting time Greenspunning[1] a database for the internal state, when I could use a real one?", and followed by "you know what I really need next? An in-memory SQLite database to store all my runtime game state!".
I didn't get very far with my experiment due to constraints of adult life, but I did prove that I can build a basic Roguelike skeleton (2D tile map, entities, walls, collisions) while storing all state in SQLite, and have it run at 60 FPS with half of the frame time to spare for other things, on moderately powerful machine (as of 6 years ago), all without too much optimization (Common Lisp with FFI bindings to libsqlite3 + a simple RLU cache in front of queries).
So it's not at all a stupid idea, IMO :). I would test it further if I had the time.
--
[0] - The term means different things to different people. I've seen at least three distinct gamedev design patterns claiming the name ECS for themselves, all conceptually incompatible with each other. More, if you also consider "whatever Unity/Unreal/Godot/... calls ECS".