Help for beginners starting out in Godot for the first time

Resources Tutorials
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In the ancient hermetic tradition (and indeed the contemporary one, since there are some that still practise the ancient ways of Hermes Trismegistus…) it is said that kindness is the first lesson we learn, but the last one we master. There is also the principle of concord, establishing and maintaining harmony, peace among brothers and sisters (of which all men and women are, whether they know it or not). Most of all, the true practitioners do not harm, but heal, help, and only ever do good things in the world. This is the way of Hermes Trismegistus (and all true hermetic practitioners).

In light of the rather tumultuous little arguments on these fora recently, I thought I would instead make something good. Instead of sewing division and discord, it is always best to help fellow practitioners, starting out here, not hindering them or browbeat them or trying to cause chaos.

Although I have been programming for a very long time (four decades) it’s been a while (19 years: I’ve been away, playing live music, working and studying), and technology has moved on a ‘little’ bit since then. (That’s Great British understatement). Therefore, this is just a list of things which might help newcomers here that are first setting out on their Godot journey, so that they might not become disheartened at the start, but instead have hope that their dream project(s) can be realised and come true.

There are many old hands here that claim that copying masters is not the way to learn. I respectfully disagree, amicably, and there is even some authority from the ancient masters themselves in support of this claim (see, esp. Quintilian 10.2). I would advise following along with these tutorials, and doing exactly what these Godot masters do (though many on here disagree with that). Be humble. Then, once you have mastered their lesson, start to do your own thing and experiment with it, have fun with it.

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

This guy made some mistakes in Godot early on and shares his experience and shows developers how to avoid them. His video (here) is very useful, as is this one (here) on his spawning system. His entire channel is excellent, very good indeed (such as this video here). Superb.

SPREADSHEETS

There is a video tutorial on how to export data from spreadsheets into Godot (here) and the same guy does one on three different approaches to data structures (here).

OPTIMISATION

This video (here, at 02m:51s) has a different approach to optimisation, using the render server directly instead of having spaghetti nodes everywhere.

RESOURCES and DICTIONARIES

This guy made some videos on when to use each of them (here), with resources more fully explained (here) and dictionaries more fully explained (here).

STATS

There’s this piece on stats (here).

Godot’s NODES EXPLAINED

This guy (here) has a video which is a couple of years old now but he runs through a concise summary of each of (many but not all) of Godot’s nodes (219 nodes are explained).

SMOOTHING OUT MOVEMENT (and a lot more)

There is this playlist (here), albeit for Godot version 2, which covers smoothing out player movement in 2D, but which also has a Godot 4.x update for that one video (here).

WHAT Godot CAN’T DO

This video (here, at 01m:44s) mentions some things which Godot can’t do. Stuff you have to write yourself.

LEARNING MATERIAL MAKER

There is this guy (here) that is useful for learning Material Maker. There’s also this bloke (here), an Australian guy with a more informal (easier to follow) style. There is also this chap (here), that explains how to group nodes, who’s also somewhat less formal.

BACKGROUND NOISE REMOVER FOR SOUND SAMPLES

There is a handy sound or background noise remover (here).

DEMOING YOUR GAME

For screen capture and demoing your project(s), especially if the built in capture software in Godot is stuttering, this website (here) is excellent.

ONE MORE (procedural serpent)

This fellow musician and really cool chick explains how she created a procedurally generated serpent over the course of a few weeks (here). Her videos are really cool.

There’s a lot more online, but these are just a few picked out to help any beginners on their Godot journey (where I was, three months ago, basically).

Very respectfully,

Hermes Trismegistus.

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What’s your question? If this is meant to be a tutorial, then it’s in the wrong category, use Resources > Tutorials

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It may help to list out videos with their titles, the links kind of merge together if they are all named (here)

Maybe something like this?

Spreadsheets

This first video tutorial covers how to export data from spreadsheets into Godot, and the creator goes on to show three different approaches to data structures.

Optimization

This developer has a different approach to optimisation, using the render server directly instead of having spaghetti nodes everywhere.

I used hash marks to create headings as well instead of all-caps titles which can be harder to read

# Header

becomes →

Header

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Dear Tiberius/Lucius Verus,

Please accept my apologies. I am rather new here. As I was searching for the correct category, I assumed (wrongly as it transpired) that the ‘help’ category was for helping others. It would appear as though this is elsewhere, and only the di immortales (immortal gods [mods]) can change it, I suppose.

I fear I shall not contribute to these fora much in future, since the tone and stern briskness of many of the contributors (but by no means all) is rather different to the academic fora I am accustomed to. Furthermore, merely mentioning that the litterati are those that have studied their Latin and ancient Greek (e.g. Suetonius, On Grammarians 4), gets effaced, simply for mentioning this plain fact.

If you would please be so kind, Tiberius, as to move this thread (assuming you are one of the immortal gods [mods]) then that would be much appreciated.

Very respectfully,

valete omnes

Mercurius Ter Maximus (Hermes Trismegistos).

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Another thing for beginers is to read the forum guidelines: Guidelines - Godot Forum
Especially the part with “Keep It Tidy.”

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I agree the tone can be a bit uninspiring here from time to time. I remember some guy a while back that bumped an old thread with a solution to the problem, just in case someone would later encounter that thread when searching for info about that problem, as he had done himself. There were some sore feelings about bumping old threads instead of creating new threads etc etc instead of just saying OK, this thread apparently pops up in the search engines when searching for solutions to this problem, lets have the solution in this thread no matter if it is old or not.

With that said I don’t really see the purpose of constant references to latin or ancient greek texts, quotes in languages most forum users will not speak, mentions of books and concepts that are typically not relevant to the questions at hand, at times seemingly more to be provocative than to contribute anything to any ongoing discussion. This is a place to discuss a game engine and game development and coding in general. If everyone would start posting to the majority partially incomprehensible thoughts about whatever niche field of interests or expertise they have besides from game development the quality of the discussions would suffer.

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We are a englisch comunety not a latain or greak one…