Getting child component

[ThatDev45]

Godot Version

v4.2.2.stable.official [15073afe3]

Question

New to godot and trying to figure out components/signals,
I have many enemies that are all copies of the same scene, what’s the right way to only damage the correct one? I have a reference to the target enemy object (from a dynamic raycast result.collider.owner) that may or may not have a ‘health’ component child, depending if it’s an enemy or a wall. I’m trying to figure out how to only signal the one enemy/wall hit, instead of all enemies.

A lot of what I’ve found is saying to use get_node and call my takeDamage function directly, but it looks like that’s outdated/bad practise to use hardcoded strings?

Is there a ‘correct’ way to check if a node has a specific child component? I’m unsure if a signal vs calling directly is the right way to approach this.

[dharhix]

You can group nodes.

Let’s say an enemy scene. Clicking on the root node of that scene, you can click on the Node tab.

Add a group name like “mobs” and in your code you can refer to this groups like this:

Example:

func _on_body_entered(body):
    if body.is_in_group("mobs"):
       body.get_hit(damage)
    else:
        # ignore

[ThatDev45]

This worked, thanks. The other piece of the puzzle I was missing was storing a reference to the component in the root node’s script and using that.