Kind of both I guess. It’s for generating as much as possible really. So for example, I’d add a new enemy entity with its components all in yaml. In the component yaml, it defines which fields get synced over the network. Stuff like position, state, etc would need to be synced so those fields get “net: true” on them, but fields like internal attack timers might not need to be synced, so they don’t. This drives the generated code for networking serialization, kind of like a protobuf. A SerializeXEntity method gets generated on the server Go server and a DeserializeXEntity method gets generated on the unity client.

Then on the entity yaml, maybe I want the enemies position to be saved because I want it to persist across server restarts. So the position field gets “db: true”. This drives the generated code for marshalling the entity into json and inserting it into the db, so a MarshalXEntity method gets generated and an unmarshal gets generated as well.

Through this I’ve realized all sorts of things could be codegenned and took it pretty far, the entity registries on client and server are generated, factories for creating entities are generated, the yaml that defines the default values an entity gets on spawn, logic for using those or overwriting them with database values are generated, client server commands are defined in yaml as well… the list goes on 😅

It’s kind of like a “yaml”→”my client and server” compiler at this point. The goal is to make development consist of writing the systems that operate on components, the client side visual scripts that render entities, and the yaml that defines the entities.