Observer entities should have names

[msvbg]

What problem does this solve or what need does it fill?

Observers are spawned as entities. When using a tool like the egui inspector, observer entities are listed under the generic "Entity" name which makes it difficult to understand what they are at a glance

What solution would you like?

Observers should spawn with a Name component which indicates that they are observers.

[alice-i-cecile]

This is partly a bug with bevy-inspector-egui, in that it should special-case Observer entities like it does for other classes of objects. But yeah, we should use the system name ideally.

[mgi388]

This should be easy to fix in inspector egui. See my recent commit fixing lights associations. jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui@8b684b3

If someone doesn’t get to it first I’ll try and do a PR over there, separately to this ticket.

[BenjaminBrienen]

Does adding a Name component to every Observer create significant overhead for the sake of a a feature which could be implemented instead by the editor GUI? In other words, can the editor just see what the system name is and use that for Observers? (Special-cased)

[msvbg]

Does adding a Name component to every Observer create significant overhead for the sake of a a feature which could be implemented instead by the editor GUI? In other words, can the editor just see what the system name is and use that for Observers? (Special-cased)

I sincerely doubt it! Observers are not spawned often and there should not be that many of them in a game. Personally I think it's good practice for every entity to have a name, and strive to enforce this in my projects, but this may not be standard in the community. Though I'm fine with any solution.

[alice-i-cecile]

I think we should aim to use Name more aggressively. Long-term, I'd like to move more of our name-like identifiers (like system names) out into the proper Name component.

[BenjaminBrienen]

In that case, maybe bevy_cli could recommend that with a lint?

[alice-i-cecile]

Yeah, I would say that's a good style level lint.

[mockersf]

Putting names on everything means allocating strings for everything. They are nice to debug, but will have a cost

[benfrankel]

FWIW Rust makes it easy to put Name components behind a feature flag:

commands.spawn((
    #[cfg(feature = "entity_names")]
    Name::new("Foo"),
    Foo,
));

[msvbg]

Putting names on everything means allocating strings for everything. They are nice to debug, but will have a cost

This cost should be very minimal in the grand scheme of things. In my project I have a few dozen observers, and the total memory allocation for names would probably be somewhere south of 1kb. I struggle to see how this would be significant even for a much larger project.

FWIW Rust makes it easy to put Name components behind a feature flag:

It could be feature gated but I don't think this should be this big of a big deal, and Bevy should not offer more obscure flags than it has to. I could see it being gated by #[cfg(debug_assertions)].

[alice-i-cecile]

Yeah, I'd love to see this unified under a dev_mode feature or something.

[mockersf]

Should this use the same Name component we already have? This component is used for animations, and fast lookup (faster than string comparison). The Name component we already have could actually not hold a name and still work the same way.

Maybe a QueryableName and a DisplayName components?

[alice-i-cecile]

Yeah, I would prefer to avoid using the component named Name for animations if the performance/UX requirements are distinct.