Demos

Typhon is the only ECS engine that isn't all-memory. It stores and processes databases larger than RAM — with crash recovery, ACID transactions, and microsecond-level access — all in one embedded engine.

Every mainstream ECS framework (Unity DOTS, Flecs, EnTT, Bevy, Unreal Mass) is an in-memory data structure: the whole world lives in RAM, and when the process dies the world dies with it. Persistence, if it exists, is a bolt-on serialize/deserialize step. Typhon inverts that. The world is a memory-mapped, page-backed, MVCC database that the ECS runtime reads and writes in place. The hot set lives in the page cache; everything else sits on SSD and pages in on demand — zero-copy, no deserialization. Kill the process and the durable state survives; the correct parts come back, the ephemeral parts are gone.

This demo exists to make that concrete. It's a pitch/showcase page — a link-out to source and design, not a hosted interactive build.

What the demo proves

AntHill is built to exercise capabilities no all-memory ECS can offer:

• Beyond-RAM storage — the database on disk is many times larger than the page cache; only the visible/active slice is resident.
• Hot/cold partitioning — pan or jump the camera and entities page in from SSD as they enter the active zone, and evict as they leave.
• Three storage modes in one world — pick durability per component: SingleVersion (fast direct mutation), Versioned (ACID + MVCC), and Transient (heap-only, intentionally lost on crash).
• Crash recovery — kill -9 and restart: durable component data (genetics) is intact; Transient data (pheromone trails) is correctly gone.
• Spatial R-Tree queries — native "find things within radius" over 2D coordinates (R2Df32).
• Parallel dispatch — multiple systems running each tick on the hot set via the DAG scheduler.

AntHill uses a four-tier simulation architecture (full sim near the camera, movement-only nearby, coarse amortized ticking further out, statistical aggregate for the rest) so the world stays alive everywhere without simulating every entity at full fidelity every tick — the same "living world at O(observers) cost" pattern that production MMOs use.

The demo

AntHill — a 3D forest-floor microcosm: an ant colony with emergent pheromone foraging, predators, fire, and interactive god-game tools, built on Typhon + Godot 4. Buildable today (phases 0–6 working). See the AntHill page for the full breakdown.

Dimension	AntHill
Entities	10M+ (ants + pheromone grid)
DB size	~640 MB
Spatial index	2D float (R2Df32)
ACID proof	Atomic food pickup / deposit
Transient proof	Pheromone trails vanish on crash
Visual impact	Emergent trail-highway formation
Godot rendering	3D MultiMeshInstance3D (ortho top-down)
Build complexity	Medium (~10 days)

Tech stack

Layer	Technology
Engine	Typhon (embedded C# ACID database + ECS runtime)
Client	Godot 4 (C# / GodotSharp), .NET 10
Rendering	MultiMeshInstance3D + custom vertex/fragment shaders
Integration	Typhon embedded in-process — renderers read straight from ECS memory, no client/server protocol

📷 Screenshots/trailer to follow (demo art is Phase 8-9).