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Event listeners, bubbling, and callbacks for Bevy

CI crates.io docs.rs Bevy tracking

An implementation of event listeners and callbacks, allowing you to define behavior with components.

Overview

  • Define custom events that can target entities.
  • Add event listener components that run callbacks when the specified event reaches that entity.
  • Define callbacks as normal bevy systems.
  • Events bubble up entity hierarchies, allowing you to attach behavior to trees of entities. For example, you could put a single event listener on the root entity of a scene, that runs a callback if any child entity is clicked on. This works because events that target the child of a scene will bubble up the hierarchy until an event listener is found.

Example

Taken from the minimal example, here we have a goblin wearing a few pieces of armor. An Attack event can target any of these entities. If an Attack reaches a piece of armor, the armor will try to absorb the attack. Any damage it is not able to absorb will bubble to the goblin wearing the armor.

commands
    .spawn((
        Name::new("Goblin"),
        HitPoints(50),
        On::<Attack>::run(take_damage),
    ))
    .with_children(|parent| {
        parent.spawn((
            Name::new("Helmet"),
            Armor(5),
            On::<Attack>::run(block_attack),
        ));
        parent.spawn((
            Name::new("Socks"),
            Armor(10),
            On::<Attack>::run(block_attack),
        ));
    });

UI

This library is intended to be upstreamed to bevy for use in making interactive UI. However, as demonstrated above, event bubbling is applicable to any kind of event that needs to traverse an entity hierarchy. This follows the basic principles of ECS patterns: it works on any entity with the required components, not just UI.

This library was initially extracted from the 0.13 version of bevy_mod_picking, as it became obvious that this is a generically useful feature.

Performance

Using DOM data from the most complex websites I could find, the stress test example was built to help benchmark the performance of this implementation with a representative dataset. Using a DOM complexity:

  • Depth: 64 (how many levels of children for an entity at the root)
  • Total nodes: 12,800 (total number of entities spawned)
  • Listener density: 20% (what percent of entities have event listeners?)

image

The blue line can be read as "how long does it take all of these events to bubble up a hierarchy and trigger callbacks at ~20% of the 64 nodes as it traverses depth?". A graph is built for every event as an acceleration structure, which allows us to have linearly scaling performance.

The runtime cost of each event decreases as the total number of events increase, this is because graph construction is a fixed cost for each type of event. Adding more events simply amortizes that cost across more events. At 50 events the runtime cost is only ~500ns/event, and about 25us total. To reiterate, this is using an entity hierarchy similar to the most complex websites I could find.

Bevy version support

bevy bevy_eventlistener
0.14 0.8
0.13 0.7
0.12 0.6
0.11 0.5

License

All code in this repository is dual-licensed under either:

at your option. This means you can select the license you prefer.

Your contributions

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.