For the past year, I’ve been learning making RPG, and in a lot of the cases, Resource is a better solution than Node.
It can be easily nested, it automatically frees itself when not needed, it’s globally unique…I’d go as far as saying it’s as important as the Node in what makes Godot special.
However, whatever I want to achieve with custom resource, most of the time I’ll have to code it all. Using it in inspector is just pain, most of the time.
When trying to add one with @export in inspector, it will list out every inherited classes side by side.
Remember when adding Node, Godot specifically grey out the virtual classes that has no uses on its own?
Not with Resource, your virtual class is right next to your inherited classes.
Making a custom Resource as combat stats holder make so much sense.
Remember when you select multiple Node, inspector would filter itself and left the shared property, allowing you to edit multiple of them simultaneously?
Forget about it, It’s Resource. Get your own custom parser, or double click on every single one in the file system.
(All same class, can’t be batch edited in Inspector.)
Resource has signal. Combining with the fact it’s globally unique, it’s a really safe way to do data sharing and communication.
Remember you have a dedicated tab for list of signal, clearly marked with the parent class it belongs to, can be connected in inspector, with pre-built functionality like adding parameters and one-time connection?
I’d bet my money that more than 70% of the users doesn’t even know signal in Resource is a thing.
Actually, most of them probably doesn’t even know Custom Resource is a thing. Despite all its strength, it’s just not good UX, if there is one.
I know for every single one of the cases, I can probably go post in godot proporsal, but my point is the overall feeling with using the supposedly strong feature of Godot.
I really want to see editor starts pouring more attention onto usability with Resource in next few 4.X releases, and completely revamp the way editor handles Resource once 5.0 becomes a thing.
Just dumping thoughts here.
Thanks for reading, opinions are welcomed.