Godot Version
Any Version Really
Heya mates,
Jumped over from Unity recently and I have a fundamental question with the way that Godot handles objects and the hierarchy in the editor.
Everything is contained in scene nodes, so say I have all my level meshes and objects in one scene, “Level 1” perhaps. That scene is contained in a further up scene, the scene handling the entire game. Now my directional main light lives in the upper scene because I want it to apply to every one of my Levels as they change, which works fine in theory, however, when I need to go into Level 1 and change something there seems to be no way to preview my directional main light inside that scene, as it’s contained in the scene further up in the hierarchy.
If I wanted to move an object around in the Level 1 scene to adjust the shadows or preview lighting I can do that, but I can’t see my main light in there.
This is just an example but I can imagine about a thousand different scenarios where this would be a nightmare for designing the look of a game. Is there a solution to this? In other game engines in the Hierarchy you can see every single object in a game in the tree and you can interact with them at the highest level, but in Godot they’re hidden, and only accessible from their own tab.
This seems so fundamentally limiting that I’m sure there’s an easy answer, any help would be really appreciated
Like, why can’t I edit objects inside the circled node while I’m in a higher level Scene?
As far as I’m aware Scenes are supposed to operate fairly similar to Unity’s Prefabs, but in Unity you still have access to what’s inside a Prefab. In this case why can’t I simply grab an object inside that Node and move it around.
Right click and select “Editable children”
Good grief. I feel like that should be on as standard… Thank you for your help
Depends on your scenes of course, most scenes are little components like players, obstacles, or some kind of game object like a weapon or pickup. These are better moved as a whole, so selecting their children only gets in the way. For importing big maps like you describe, Editable Children is quite necessary.
Yeah, that might become more clear as I go. For an engine aimed at absolute beginners I reckon having the scene hierarchy operate completely differently from every other piece of 3d Software on the planet, and having the solution hide in a drop down of 15 options is not terribly user friendly.
I mean, each node already has a collapse button next to it, why the extra step of disabling it completely by standard is imo not great but cest la vie
I’m surprised to hear you’ve found some consistency! Haha scene management is far from a solved problem and will vary based on what problems the software wants to solve. I have yet to see a simple solution, maybe with Roblox but it’s very much to the engine’s detriment, managing a Roblox scene is difficult and full of foot-guns.
scenes you make can be put into the same scene more then once, and the same scene can be put in to two different scenes.
so a scene can not know all that it will be placed into.
their are benefits and drawbacks to making children editable, things may not change as you expect, test it out with just a scene of 3dnode and scene of a mesh3d, before you start putting a lot of work in to something or risk work you have already put into something to get a feel of how editable children, multiple scenes, make local. godot is so light and fast starting a whole new project just to quickly learn something or experiment is no big deal at all.
when you start a scene it’s better to have it more flexible without edible children, then commit to editable children when you are mostly sure that the scene with children being edited is done, but needs fine-tuning for this scene that it’s now part of.
this cube scene needs a heart on it because this level scene requires a companion cube for this level.