Scenes

In Unity you would make your game inside one or multiple Scenes. These scenes can represent a single town, a single stage or something like the main menu of a game. Different scenes can be loaded at the same time or one after another.

In the Zel Game Engine this concept of scenes is represented in Levels. A Level contains Entities, Components and Systems. They all need to be created or registered in order to be used inside a Level.

Multiple Scenes

It is possible to create multiple Levels just like in Unity. The important thing to note here is that Entities or Components can only access data from within their own Level. So if the player want to access an Enemy from a different Level than the player is in, that is not possible.

Also there can only be one active level at the moment through the active_level variable. You can write your own level manager to be able to use multiple Levels at once.

Scene Manager

For the moment there is no Level Manager in the Zel Game Engine. Loading and unloading levels is done through zel_level_create and zel_level_destroy.

There must always be a level assigned to active_level. So when switching levels, this needs to be done in one frame. Destroying the old level and immediately creating the new one.

Running a Level

When running a Scene in Unity all the Update, FixedUpdate and LateUpdate functions get called together with all kinds of other functions. In the Zel Game Engine only zel_logic and zel_render get called. As the names may suggest zel_render is for all your rendering code. While all Systems that you have registered in a Level are called in zel_logic.

You can decide what happens inside these functions. So if you decide you want to do it a different way, that is totally possible. Have a look at the Update section for more information.