Architectural decisions when porting content to Godot

Wolfram

Hello! So I've got an architecture question, but it doesn't really require a specific response, rather I would like to see what people think about the concept and the immediate solutions that may jump to mind.

I'm working on porting an existing game into the godot language, it's a text based adventure. Each level is it's own scene and the plan is to switch between them on and off the scene tree, but here's the snag: a sizeable bit of content from the source game actually relies on the state of other levels, such as checking if an NPC is located in a room that wouldn't be loaded because it's in another level.

How would you approach this problem? Should keeping all 450 or so rooms loaded at all times with the intent for that number to keep growing be an issue to worry about?

cybereality

In that case it might be better to separate the code and the visual representation. You can have classes with variables and properties that exist in code without any objects in the tree (called Scenes in Godot, similar to Prefabs in Unity). But depending on how extensive your graphics are, you say it's a text game, 450 nodes is not that much. You can easily have thousands in Godot with no problem to performance. But you can set visible to false, it won't draw on the screen, but the logic and game loop will still run and you can access variables.

Wolfram

@cybereality said: In that case it might be better to separate the code and the visual representation. You can have classes with variables and properties that exist in code without any objects in the tree (called Scenes in Godot, similar to Prefabs in Unity). But depending on how extensive your graphics are, you say it's a text game, 450 nodes is not that much. You can easily have thousands in Godot with no problem to performance. But you can set visible to false, it won't draw on the screen, but the logic and game loop will still run and you can access variables.

That does make sense. I don't have a great sense of how resource intensive or performance costly my code is. One solution hovering around was to make all calls reference a temporary save file where properties of scenes would be loaded upon entering the scene tree. Like a relay. Since these commands aren't really happening more than once or twice every few minutes of gameplay. I thought it might be good because this is supposed to be able to run on mobile.

I had a feeling I might be worrying over nothing.

cybereality

So objects and code existing is no problem. As I said, you can have hundreds or maybe into the low thousands with no issue. However, if the graphics are heavy (animation, etc.) or the code is complex (AI, etc.) then that will slow performance. What you can do is pause scenes (set process to false) and then hide them (set visible to false). They will remain in system memory but take no performance. Then you can show them when the player gets to that room, or selectively update certain rooms (like the 4 adjacent rooms to the one the player is in, not all 450 at the same time).