Overview

There are a few plugins provided with SystemsRx that you can opt in to use by just referencing the dll and loading the plugin from your application class in the LoadPlugins phase. Anyone in the community can make their own plugins and hopefully going forward there will be more plugins available.

How to use plugins?

You just need to reference the dll in your project and then in your LoadPlugins phase you just load the desired plugin entry point. Here is an example of loading some of the official SystemsRx plugins:

public abstract class SystemsRxConsoleApplication : SystemsRxApplication
{
    public override IDependencyContainer Container { get; } = new NinjectDependencyContainer();

    protected override void LoadPlugins()
    {
        // Register the plugins we want to use
        RegisterPlugin(new ComputedsPlugin());
    }

    protected override void StartSystems()
    {
        this.StartAllBoundSystems();
    }
}

Once they are registered there the application will setup any dependencies for the plugin and kick start anything that needs to be running.

How to make plugins

Plugins are pretty simple, they just require you to implement the ISystemsRxPlugin interface and that's it.

Here is an example of the reactive systems plugin, which binds some conventional system handlers for the SystemExecutor to make use of, then we output any systems we need to register (in this case none).

public class ReactiveSystemsPlugin : ISystemsRxPlugin
{
    public string Name => "Reactive Systems";
    public Version Version { get; } = new Version("1.0.0");
    
    public void SetupDependencies(IDependencyContainer container)
    {
        container.Bind<IConventionalSystemHandler, ReactToEntitySystemHandler>();
        container.Bind<IConventionalSystemHandler, ReactToGroupSystemHandler>();
        container.Bind<IConventionalSystemHandler, ReactToDataSystemHandler>();
        container.Bind<IConventionalSystemHandler, SetupSystemHandler>();
        container.Bind<IConventionalSystemHandler, TeardownSystemHandler>();
    }

    public IEnumerable<ISystem> GetSystemsForRegistration(IDependencyContainer container) => Array.Empty<ISystem>();
}

There are plenty of example plugins in the core repo and there is also a buff one available on github too which was designed for unity originally but same concept applies.

Some potential plugin use cases

• Sharing your own custom conventions (much like reactive systems and batched systems plugins)

• Sharing pre-made game logic, i.e a buffs, stealth, inventory etc

• Optimized implementations for specific platforms

You can wrap up almost anything into a shareable plugin, and if you are doing architectural plugins you can replace almost any part of EcsRx from within a plugin, or if you are making game logic you can use events/components as your contracts and just register your systems on setup so everything "just works" out the box on any platform (assuming you have no platform specific code in there).