Your entities need ID's in some form or another, if you want to persist them to disk, or pass them over a network. Thus, what you probably want is not to get rid of ID's, but to dynamically generate them so you don't have to set them manually in the code every time you create a new Entity-class.

I've done this in my latest C# project by creating a special List class that assigns a unique index to every item added to the list. Unlike a normal list, when an item is removed, the indices for the rest of the items don't change (Internally it's implemented using a Dictionary).

Thus, as long as the entities are added to the list in the same order every time the executable is run (or, for networking, between all clients), they will always have the same ID.

The problem with this solution is that it's not in a human-friendly format. To fix this, you could use reflection to prepend the type-name.

Your entities need ID's in some form or another, if you want to persist them to disk, or pass them over a network. Thus, what you probably want is not to get rid of ID's, but to dynamically generate them so you don't have to set them manually in the code every time you create a new Entity-class.

I've done this in my latest C# project by creating a special List class that assigns a unique index to every item added to the list. Unlike a normal list, when an item is removed, the indices for the rest of the items don't change (Internally it's implemented using a Dictionary).

Thus, as long as the entities are added to the list in the same order every time the executable is run (or, for networking, between all clients), they will always have the same ID.

The problem with this solution is that it's not in a human-friendly format. To fix this, you could use reflection to prepend the type-name.

Your entities need ID's in some form or another, if you want to persist them to disk, or pass them over a network. Thus, what you probably want is not to get rid of ID's, but to dynamically generate them so you don't have to set them manually in the code every time you create a new Entity-class.

I've done this in my latest C# project by creating a special List class that assigns a unique index to every item added to the list. Unlike a normal list, when an item is removed, the indices for the rest of the items don't change (Internally it's implemented using a Dictionary).

Thus, as long as the entities are added to the list in the same order every time the executable is run (or, for networking, between all clients), they will always have the same ID.

Your entities need ID's in some form or another, if you want to persist them to disk, or pass them over a network. Thus, what you probably want is not to get rid of ID's, but to dynamically generate them so you don't have to set them manually in the code every time you create a new Entity-class.

I've done this in my latest C# project by creating a special List class that assigns a unique index to every item added to the list. Unlike a normal list, when an item is removed, the indices for the rest of the items don't change (Internally it's implemented using a Dictionary).

Thus, as long as the entities are added to the list in the same order every time the executable is run (or, for networking, between all clients), they will always have the same ID.

The problem with this solution is that it's not in a human-friendly format. To fix this, you could use reflection to prepend the type-name.