I am trying to create a starmap for my game.

Abarasc

Greetings, I hope that this is the right place to ask a question related to programming in Godot. (I am new to the forum!)

I am a self-taught hobby-programmer, and my experience with Godot is not to extensive yet. I'm working on a game in the vein of something like StarFlight or Star Control 2, and I am currently working on it's starmap. What I want to do is to create a scrollable starmap where a cursor object will display the name of the star it touches. And my question is this;

Would it be better to spawn these stars as objects with their own collission masks, or is it easier to simply have a large list of x,y coordinates focused on the center of the stars, to which the cursor object you move over the starmap responds? The latter seemed best to me, but I figured I could not only be wrong about this, but there might also be other better options. (Again, I am self-taught, this is literally the first time I'm asking for help. I'm... not great with that.)

Also if the latter option were indeed the best way to do it, is there an in build function (in a relevant pre-made object?) or some sort of method by which to check a list of x,y coordinates? I had been playing with a for loop when trying to get this working, and I just seemed to run into the problem that either it detected the stars correctly, but not if the cursor was not touching any stars. Or alternatively I could get it to detect wether it was or wasn't touching the final star in the loop or not, but not anything else. (I can of course provide code if/as need be!)

Also is it better to put a long list of coordinates and relevant star properties in the code, or in a seperate cfg/json/similar file?

I freely admit I might be an idiot missing something obvious or going about things wrong. (or even entirely out of my depth) But that is why I figured I'd try to get some input of course! See what people more familiar with Godot think. Checking it's reference material ultimately can sometimes only get you so far. (And that is certainly often rather concise.)

Thanks in advance!

TwistedTwigleg

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Abarasc

Yeah, it was in Spam, I THINK I confirmed it now! Let's see if this gets caught in moderation...

Abarasc

Nope, works now!

Sir_Connery

There are several ways to do what you want. Picking the best one really depends on how you plan to scale the game. Are you going to randomly generate the locations of the stars or are they in a static map? Are you going to have different kinds of stars? Do you want them to interact with anything else as well as the mouse pointer? How many stars do you anticipate per game? 10? 100?

Some more info would be welcome.

Sir_Connery

A method that's very modular is to use the control node's mouse_entered signal. So you could just make a star scene, have a control node there that on mouse_entered emits a signal. Then catch the signal on an Autoload UI script. This way you can have procedural generation with it, static maps etc. And since it's a signal on any weird case that the signal isn't working you won't crash the game or have other weird behavior, unlike with regular scripts.

Abarasc

Ah, my apologies for the lack of info! (And the late response, since real life popped up.)

Anyway, the stars will be a static map, and I did already create that map in fact!

It's a 1001 stars! (plus some initially hidden stuff.)

They are different types of stars (different spectrums a few binaries and trinaries (But that mostly just means the cursor will fix onto the central star since that doesn't amount to much but a little visual change on the map.)

All the stars need to do on the map, is when the pointer (controllable with the keyboard or mouse (I think being able to toggle keyboard and mouse control for the pointer would be good.) But when the pointer touches them the program needs to know which star the pointer is touching (And display info on it, or be able to lock that star as a location to travel to.)

I did in fact also procedurally generate the planetary systems these stars would lead to, but that's neither here nor there for the map. (That'd be another program, the star system exploration program.)

Now the mouse_entered method sounds interesting, but is it suitable for a very large map? Also what if I want to also be able to control the cursor with the keyboard? Using a signal would work if the stars are objects themselves. But if it's better for a large map to work with a list of coordinates instead of seperate objects, I imagine that wouldn't work, since it's just the object checking a list of coordinates (And not interacting with another object that'd send a signal.)

I hope this helps elaborate?

Sir_Connery

If you want thousands of star systems then using objects (scenes) as star systems might just lag out the game. Someone that knows Godot better can probably answer that.

You probably want to go with a coordinate system and only load the scenes on mouseover.

Abarasc

That was what seemed best to me too, for that very reason. So many objects causing lag.

So maybe I should ask a question about 'how do I detect an object colliding with a list of coordinates'? (Since making it register if it's on one coordinate works fine, but when I try to do this with a for loop, well I already described what went wrong there.)

Sir_Connery

I hope someone more knowledgeable joins this discussion.

You could try getting the mouse position, match it with the coordinates. And then load the scenes nearby or something. https://docs.godotengine.org/fi/stable/tutorials/inputs/mouse_and_input_coordinates.html

get_viewport().get_mouse_position()

When loading the "star" scene you could easily use the mouse_entered signal, then have your UI scene popup on mouseover that contains all info from the current star.

On the other hand.

Just make the star scene, place a thousand of them and see if it lags out. You already know how to generate the random positions for scenes so it shouldn't take too much to try it out.

If it doesn't lag out you can just use the signal method, which is what Godot's built for anyway.

Abarasc

I will give it a shot and see what I can do with it, the star graphics ARE small.

I'll just play with a few other idea's I can think of too. (Though I am self-taught, I've been hobby programming for a fair while, so I can always try both the multiple object method and see if I can get my 'list of coordinates' thing to work better then it did so far.)

Inbuild functions and what an engine was build for is great, but I guess if in doubt, fiddle with some code and see if you can get it to do what you want, right?

Thanks for the help, and I'll see where I can go. If it doesn't work I'll just make a new thread with some more specific questions about lists of coordinates or something. :)

Sir_Connery

The Godot discord is a much more active place than here. You could get more specific answers there. Good luck with the project.

Abarasc

I have never used Discord actually... I probably should look into that!

Thanks for the tip!