Entity Registry

Problem: Coordinating entity creation across multiple agents in a distributed system often results in ID collisions or high-latency round trips to a central authority.

The EntityRegistry manages entity allocation. It is designed so that entities can be created and destroyed across different nodes without ID collisions.

Domains

The registry uses domains (or “buckets”). Each domain has a unique ID, which is the hi bits of an Entity.

Every agent owns one domain. An agent uses its own domain ID when it creates an entity. This prevents collisions because other agents use different domain IDs.

Predictive Spawning

Agents can spawn entities immediately in their local world because each has its own ID space. Other agents will receive these events later and add the entity to their local copy of that domain.

Determinism and Rollback

ID allocation is deterministic. The local ID increments within a domain. If a user resets the world and runs the same spawning logic, the system generates the same sequence of IDs.

Each domain also tracks an operation sequence number (opSeq). This helps remote agents verify that they have received all changes in the correct order.

Conflict Avoidance

Glom avoids conflicts by enforcing domain ownership. Only the assigned agent can allocate IDs from a domain. Other agents can see these entities but cannot create new ones in that space.