Can someone explain this line of code to me?

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1

Godot Version

4.4- Stable

Question

Hi! I’m a Godot noob, and I was having a lot of trouble with this one line of code. For reference, it’s found in the tutorial Dodge The Creeps (player.gd) . I’m having a lot of trouble understanding clamp, and particularly how it’s used within this project. Can someone help?

2

If you press F1 in the Godot editor you can search up functions and classes for documentation, you can also ctrl+click in the script editor to pull up documentation or source on the clicked function.

Clamp takes a value and returns a value at least the specified minimum and at most the specified maximum. It is essentially defined as so

func clamp(value, minimum, maximum):
    if value < minimum:
        return minimum
    elif value > maximum:
        return maximum
    else:
        return value

Vector2 has a similar function so it reads as position.clamp(minimum, maximum).

The actual line uses zero as the minimum, and screen_size as the maximum, so the position cannot go below zero (off screen to the left/top) and cannot go above the screen size (off screen to the right/down). However, clamp doesn’t change the position on it’s own, it makes a copy, so the position has to be set to the final value

# get the clamped value
var clamped_position = position.clamp(Vector2.ZERO, screen_size)
# assign the clamped value
position = clamped_position

# is the same as
position = position.clamp(Vector2.ZERO, screen_size)
1 Like
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Thanks! I had read the documentation on it, but your first code explained it really well. Now it all makes sense, thanks