Where can I find good information about complex node to node communication?

jtuchel

Hello all,

first of all, so you don't misunderstand me, I have been using Unity for a longer time and tried Godot and I am really excited, a great engine.

As a beginner I started with a simple Tic Tac Toe game and used many signals to emit events from children to their parents. But I'm struggling with more "real world" scenarios, e.g.

Are Autoload scripts the only solution to transport data across the scenes? I personally try to avoid static stuff as much as I can
If Node A emits a signal, its parent node can listen to it and call the other children. This might be an overhead for the parent. Are there any ways to communicate between Scene A and Scene B ( both are subscenes in Scene C, e.g. Player and HealthBar in Level 1 ) directly?
Is there a way to decouple the hard references from parent A to children n ... m ? I would like to avoid calling $child_1 directly, it feels hardcoded to me
Children emit signals and parents listen for the signal. But if parent A wants children B to jump, parent A must call $children_b.jump() although it doesn't know if that function even exists. It worked for me, but felt bad. Changing an exported variable of a children to "trigger" an action feels bad too because I personally would not run any logic inside a property setter. So how can a parent call a children to do something? If not possible, is it possible for the children to observe variable changes?

I think there are so much more questions about a "clean" node structure. Godot felt super easy and nice to me :) but for now, I'm struggling with a large scale architecture

Thanks in advance!

Nerdzmasterz

Hi! Welcome to Godot.

There's a few things you can do.

You could also save your game data in a file and access it through a save data node (It could be any node with a script attached that saves and loads data, and is in each scene.). Be sure to save to user//: whatever, as ref//: goes away upon being released into the wild.

2.You could also tell another node to do something by directly calling it like this: get_node("Area2D").whatever. The nice thing about doing it the way mentioned above is that you can actually drag and drop the node you're calling from the hierarchy right into the code, and it will fill out its name. The ones calling each other don't even have to be children of the node calling- in fact, the nodes can call their parent nodes as well, although I don't usually code like that. Personally, I like to usually use get_node(whatever_node) to get the children, and emit signals to the parents. Another nice trick about get_node is that once you have the node, you can access that node's functions. If you start typing the name of a function in that node, the function you're looking for should pop up under what you're typing.

Hopefully this helps.

spacecloud

Connecting a node's signals to itself can be very useful sometimes.

Nerdzmasterz

I am a bit curious on what you're after, exactly, @jtuchel . Is there anything specific you're after?