Newbie questions about 2D game tutorial

Badut

Hi, I'm working through the "Your first 2D game" tutorial and had a few questions to help my understanding. For the Player scene, we used an Area2D node as the root node. But for the Mob scene, we use a RigidBody2D node as the root node. I get that in both cases, we need the ability to detect collision so we need a node type that can emit the body_entered signal. But why Area2D for the Player and RigidBody2D for the Mob? Would it work if it was vice-versa?

Also about node hierarchy within a scene. We used Area2D as the Player root node and add AnimatedSprite, CollisionShape2D and VisibilityNotifier2D as children. Could we just as easily have made the Player an AnimatedSprite, for example, at the root and added Area2D etc as children?

Probably don't need to know all this to complete the tutorial but I'm just thinking when I try to make a game without guidance from a tutorial to say "use this node, then this node", an understanding of why will help.

fire7side

The difference is that you steer the player with keyboard, but the mob kind of moves on it's own, so generally you can use more physics actions that you don't have to completely program if you use a rigid body. That's probably why they did it in that example, but it's not necessarily true. Many times you want to steer everything through code, or you may even want the player to be a rigid body.