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.)

• For information about entity classes see the entityDef article.