Why are people still using string references? Like in the case of "Bumpable" - this could be a class name and reference could be via the class name instead of checking the node name by string. String references are super dangerous, as you will get a potential error only at runtime if you make a typo, IDE can't help you. Don't get me wrong - I like the idea behind component pattern and I use it myself sometimes, but the execution could be better in my opinion, unless I'm missing some obvious reasons for doing it this way.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
75 points (100.0% liked)
Godot
5874 readers
42 users here now
Welcome to the programming.dev Godot community!
This is a place where you can discuss about anything relating to the Godot game engine. Feel free to ask questions, post tutorials, show off your godot game, etc.
Make sure to follow the Godot CoC while chatting
We have a matrix room that can be used for chatting with other members of the community here
Links
Other Communities
- !inat@programming.dev
- !play_my_game@programming.dev
- !destroy_my_game@programming.dev
- !voxel_dev@programming.dev
- !roguelikedev@programming.dev
- !game_design@programming.dev
- !gamedev@programming.dev
Rules
- Posts need to be in english
- Posts with explicit content must be tagged with nsfw
- We do not condone harassment inside the community as well as trolling or equivalent behaviour
- Do not post illegal materials or post things encouraging actions such as pirating games
We have a four strike system in this community where you get warned the first time you break a rule, then given a week ban, then given a year ban, then a permanent ban. Certain actions may bypass this and go straight to permanent ban if severe enough and done with malicious intent
Wormhole
Credits
- The icon is a modified version of the official godot engine logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)
- The banner is from Godot Design
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
@mrsgreenpotato @TheLongPrice Isn't the string reference just in the GetNodeOrNull call? I prefer to just export the nodes I need, so I don't build up Node-structure dependencies in the code. Therefore I don't have "Magic strings" in my code (almost) at all.
Correct, I'd also use exported values if possible. But that isn't flexible enough in some cases, because you'd need to individually export all possible attributes that the node might have.
For it to be more flexible, you could have something like this:
for child in get_children():
if child is ClassNameHere:
return child
That would give you the same result as described in the article, without string reference. You could make a static func for it and call it a day :)
@mrsgreenpotato what case do you have in mind where an export is not flexible enough? Also, do you return a Variant or generic Node(2D/3D) of a function like that or are you working with Generics then? So you do: GetNode<Bumpable>() for example?
We don't have generics in gdscript unfortunately, there's a whole thread discussing about it here. You'd need to either have this piece of code in every place you want to retrieve the component, or you could have a static function in the component class that takes a node as a parameter and checks if it has children nodes of the correct type. Then it can return the correct type node as well and should be fully type safe. But you need to have this static function on each and every component class, which I think you can't overcome without generics.
@mrsgreenpotato ahh ok, could you extend from a base node type and add this function respectively?
We've defined "entities" in our project and each Entity-Type has a script for some basic functionality (to define that it IS an entity etc.).
In our project a CharacterBody3D entity is an "Actor", while a RigidBody3D is an "Item" for example. And we're basically only working with these and define components for them that we can retrieve via a Dictionary<StringName, Resource>
@mrsgreenpotato (2/2) and in our case, we've put every piece of data into resources where we export the values we need. If we need a node in a scene, we just export it and it's mostly a direct childNode of the scene. All in all we have a system where the example zombie consists of the following components: Ai, Model, Stats, Info, Sfx, Chemistry. These have their own scenes that get added to the entityNode. In the end there's no need for such a helper function basically :D (at least yet)
Yes, as long as you know what components are inside the Zombie scene, then you can export it. But the idea of being more flexible is that you shouldn't need to update the Zombie class when you add a new component to it. E.g. You want the zombie to be "Bumpable" now (for some reason :)), then you should be able to just add the Bumpable node to your Zombie scene and that's it. With your approach, you'd need to also reference and export it in the Zombie class first.
That would definitely be an improvement, using classes is probably more robust. In my case, the project wasn't too huge and it was solo, so I never hit issues with string references.
Nice! I like it!
Thank you! I just started on a new project and it felt nice to remind myself what worked well in the previous one.
Thanks duder