Post · bonfire.mavnn.eu

Okay, #gamedev people out there. I'm building a slightly larger project in #godot for the first time and despite my normal functional programming background Godot seems to be engineered to lean heavily into "original" (i.e. message passing) OO programming. It does it in a really nice way too, so I'm not even too sad.

The question: how have you chosen to connect signals together in your projects? I'm leaning towards a singleton autoloaded message bus, but it feels like something that may have downsides I haven't spotted yet due to my lack of experience with the engine.

#godot #gamedev

ScruffyBrush

@[email protected] · 2 months ago

@mavnn
The general tip I hear a lot is signal up call down.
As in for what would be a unity prefab/components that are not stand alone I like to make the parent responsible of wiring the children exchanges together directly

For jams I almost always have a Singleton auto load that holds all global events that can be fired and wired

A few various noob traps I fell into:
- avoid circular dependencies in your auto loads, they cause hard to debug issues. I tried refactoring my single message auto load in separate connected ones and had a lot of issues. Think if I'd start over I'd limit much more how many I use and refactor most into scene scripts
- strong typing is worth it for the auto complete imho
- imho abandon the idea of using _init() especially with params. The engine calls it under the hood in cases I didn't expect without any params and causes weird errors
- read the getting started docs. Overall surprised by its quality and how a lot of it is a quick walkthrough

Antiquity/Midnight Spire Games

@[email protected] · 2 months ago

@mavnn I think this is a common approach and it's what I did. The only pitfalls I have run into are that it can get a bit tangled tracing the effects of a particular signal in a big project, and that I'm not sure if the order that listeners are called is strictly defined. So, nothing that can't be overcome with a bit of care.

Antiquity/Midnight Spire Games

@[email protected] · 2 months ago

@mavnn For nodes with a direct relationship like GUI components, I just connect them directly, either in the editor or in code. Some people prefer to connect and emit all signals in code to make them easier to trace (and probably more code-portable). I haven't had an issue connecting via editor within self-contained components, but the connections can get a bit murky in e.g. complex GUI scenes, and you have to be careful about deleting methods that your IDE says aren't called anywhere.

Michael Newton

@mavnn · 2 months ago

@[email protected] For things with a direct relationship, yeah, I just wire things up in code (or even within a scene using the editor). I'm more looking at signals that are likely to have several listeners (or varying listeners) or 'central' nodes like the player which I don't want to make a singleton but I also don't want to hand a reference around to every single other node in the game (enemies giving 😜 if they die, shops charging money, etc). Maybe I'm over thinking it, but a message bus the player listens to seems to deal with a lot of these issues.