(Possibly) incorrect behavior of MultiplayerSpawner?

Help
1

Godot Version

4.4.1

Question

I’m working on a client/server architecture for my game. My main scene has top level nodes for Lobbies and Games, and a spawner for both. In the Lobby scene, I have a MultiplayerSynchronizer with Public Visibility = false. In a server manager script, I have logic like this…

func create_lobby(lobby_id : String) -> void:
	if not multiplayer.is_server():
		return
		
	var client_id = multiplayer.get_remote_sender_id()
		
	var lobby = load("res://interface/lobby/Lobby.tscn").instantiate()
	lobby.name = lobby_id
	lobby.lobby_id = lobby_id
	lobby.lobby_host = client_id
	lobby.set_multiplayer_authority(1)
	lobby.syncro.set_visibility_for(client_id, true)
	$/root/Main/Lobbies.add_child(lobby)

The lobby scene itself also has a MultiplayerSpawner called PlayerNameSpawner.

Now, if I run a server and two clients, when I create a lobby on one client, I see an interesting behavior.

Using the debugger, if I inspect the runtime scene tree on all three, I see the expected scene structure. The server and the client who created the lobby see the lobby added into the correct place within the scene tree, and the client who didn’t create the lobby doesn’t see that scene in the scene tree at all. Great!

However, I also get an error on the client who didn’t create the lobby.

E 0:00:15:101   get_node: Node not found: "Main/Lobbies/6c4f6ffb-3180-49ef-9816-4cab1d9369de/PlayerNameSpawner" (relative to "/root").
  <C++ Error>   Method/function failed. Returning: nullptr
  <C++ Source>  scene/main/node.cpp:1877 @ get_node()

It’s almost as if the PlayerNameSpawner is expecting all clients to have that node in the scene tree, even though that isn’t the case?

2

Okay, I think I figured out the answer, but it doesn’t make me happy.

The PlayerNameSpawner was spawning a little scene that exends Label. The scene is just a label component and a MultiplayerSynchronizer to synchronize the contents of the label. This seemed like a way to show the player list to all the members of the lobby using the built in high level multiplayer constructs in Godot.

The issue arose in that the PlayerLabel scene’s multiplayer synchronizer was set to Public Visibility = true. It seems as though, even though this scene (nor it’s parent) was present in the scene tree, the public visible flag meant that it was expecting it to be so.

If I set public visible to off, and manually populate each PlayerName control’s synchronizers visibility, it works as expected. My hope that was public visible would only extend as far as the parents synchronizer visibility. Does that make sense?