The common terminology is "structure of arrays" (SOA) and "array of structures" (AOS) which come from C and is most often seen in terms of SIMD work.

Typically, the AOS approach is faster, if used appropriately, but SOA tends to be easier to work with (and hence optimizes for the more important quality - development time).

AOS, especially in Java, means that your data can remain tightly packed in memory. You can iterate over properties and expect the CPU cache and such to remain happy. With AOS, especially in Java, every object ends up allocated "somewhere" in memory. Iterating over objects could potentially thrash your CPU cache pretty heavily.

In the end, I would take whichever approach you find easiest to use. Your development time is far more valuable than whether your game supports 10 year old PCs or only 9 year old PCs (you're very unlikely to be doing anything htat needs the latest hardware).

The common terminology is "structure of arrays" (SOA) and "array of structures" (AOS) which come from C and is most often seen in terms of SIMD work.

Typically, the AOS approach is faster, if used appropriately, but SOA tends to be easier to work with (and hence optimizes for the more important quality - development time).

SOA, especially in Java, means that your data can remain tightly packed in memory. You can iterate over properties and expect the CPU cache and such to remain happy. With AOS, especially in Java, every object ends up allocated "somewhere" in memory. Iterating over objects could potentially thrash your CPU cache pretty heavily.

In the end, I would take whichever approach you find easiest to use. Your development time is far more valuable than whether your game supports 10 year old PCs or only 9 year old PCs (you're very unlikely to be doing anything htat needs the latest hardware).