Entity

An entity is a functional unit of all games basing on id software technology.

Examples for entities are:

• lights
• AI (guards, spiders)
• the player
• path nodes
• moveables
• readables
• models (or "static meshes" to be more precise)
• the world itself ("worldspawn")

An entity's functional behaviour is entirely defined through its spawnargs, a collection of key/value pairs. The spawnargs define the type of an entity, and the parameters which are passed to the code. There is virtually no limit on the number of spawnargs - some entities like the player have over 200 key/values.

Each entity needs to have at least two spawnargs to be valid: a "name" and a "classname". The "name" of an entity must be unique in a map - no two entities are allowed to have the same name. (The next most important thing is the "origin" spawnarg which defines the absolute world location the entity is spawned at.)

See also

• For information about entity classes see the entityDef article.