Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Godot works great on Ubuntu; if you are using the Steam version or the downloaded binary, it does not matter, it runs fine. We looked at the menus in the last issue, now let's look at the lower part of the interface. I’ll be referring to the DEFAULT layout. If you have moved yours about, just pay attention. In this issue, we will be looking at the bottom portion of the Godot interface. It is important that you know where to look for things, before you start to make your application or game. The first thing you may notice is the list at the bottom of the screen, “Output”, “Debugger”, “Audio”, “Animation”, and “Shader Editor”. Output is as it says on the tin. If I were to add a print statement to my code, the output would appear here. In my case, you can also see that I added a “Label” node (image from the last issue) and then deleted the node. To the right of “4.4.1.stable”, we can see a pin icon and an icon with two arrows going up. This arrow icon expands the output, so one can see what is happening in real time; for example, I wanted to make a “Pang!” clone and was experimenting with a bouncing ball and a brick or glass platform or whatever “Pang!” had, so every time the ball “hit” a platform, I would print “boing!” to the console to see if it did it, every time, on every platform, so I could see a bounce via a signal, with “area entered” (more on that in the GDScript issue). You can see how quickly the space would fill with “boing!” being printed over and over on a new line. Pinning the bottom display would make it visible at all times, as there are times when Godot auto-hides this panel.
I’m going to skip the debugger as it will be a 1000 words by itself! :) I’ll see how it goes when I reach the end of the article. The audio tab is where you control the way your audio behaves. We can add a bus with the “Add Bus” button at the top. Every time you add a bus, it will link to the previous bus. When you open the tab, you should see a “Master” bus that connects to the speakers. Now if I were to add another bus (you can name it whatever you like, say effects), you will see that it does not connect to the speakers at the bottom of the bus, but it will chain to the master bus (easy way to remember this is that you can only ever patch left, not right). This makes a “choke point” that helps you control the sound in the game, say the master volume or music volume or sound effects volume and so forth, but we will get to that in the future. Let’s talk about “SMB”. Those are for “Solo”, “Mute” and “Bypass” (bypass still does all the work, but does not play the sound). This should already have the gears turning in your head. Usually it is not a good idea to add effects directly to the master, add a bus, add the effect and pipe it to the master. This gives you finer control when it comes to getting your sound “just right”. If you added a bus you don’t need, simply click on it and hit the delete key. You can also do that via the vertical ellipses next to “SMB”. The nice thing is that when you create a cool combo, you can save it and use it in other projects, as it saves in the .tres format, and that is portable between projects. You can also drag and drop audio buses to move them in the chain, they are not static. At first glance, the animation tab is rather empty. It only comes to life, once you have animations. I’m lightly going to skim these and we can dive in a bit deeper in a future issue, as with the debugger, it may require an issue on its own. Needless to say, you can see the panel come alive with more things, once you start adding sprite sheets. As for the “Shader Editor”, we will also skip that for now, as it merits more space than this issue is going to give. Just know that it will also be bare if you were to open it on a new project. Go ahead, have a look. Now there are two more menu items that are not displayed unless you have the nodes for it in your scene tree, they are “TileSet” and “TileMap”: I have trouble remembering which is which and I really hope they update the names soon. The tilemap is your base, and it contains the actual tile map. It lets you set up tiles, patterns and terrains. The tileset is the subset of the tile map that you will be using, as you don’t need to use it all, if you don’t want to. You could download a whole tilemap from OpenGameArt, for instance, but you want only a small part of the tiles, not all. However, you do not paint on the canvas from here, even though you can clearly see a “Paint” icon. You do that, when you select tiles on the tilemap and use *that “paint” icon. Yes, I know, very confusing! Again, we will dive into these in a future issue as things will require quite a bit of explaining. I just want you to know that if you do not see them, it’s no big deal, it just means that you do not have a tilemap node in your scene tree and you did not click on it (that last bit is important, as just having it will not display them).
For all its improvements in the 4.x.x branch, I still get confused, as I still consider myself a n00b. This will happen to you too, don’t fret, we will puzzle it out together! Let me circle back to output (first image), you will see there are icons in the top-right. To clear the output, you use the paintbrush icon. Yes, a bit counter-intuitive, I know… However, directly below the paintbrush, is the collapse icon, that “folds up” all the same-y errors, making it easier to read your output log. I’m going to skip the copypaste and search icons, they are self explanatory. What I am going to talk about are the four toggles below that. These toggle the type of output you will see in that message window. You can think of these like log messages, starting from the bottom again… :) Think of them as informational, then warnings, and then errors, and you turn on the level you need, so that you are not overwhelmed by messages when you are trying to figure out what went wrong. NOTE: In my screenshots, you may see a bar at the bottom for searching, but you may not see it on your version, that is because the little magnifying glass icon is pressed in mine, sorry I forgot mine was on.
There you go, now you know why you may not see x or y, when following along a tutorial on Godot. Hopefully I helped you with any confusion. Don’t be like me and download a different version, to find out *why this or that panel is not there. Stick to the latest versions as there are nodes that are being deprecated, so there is no point in getting an old version. A quick word on the Steam version – that downloads and installs Flatpak, so if you suddenly have flatpaks installed and updating and did not want it, that is the reason. That goes doubly if you have a metered network, the direct download of the binary is like 120MB versus the 1.2GB that Steam installs. We can get into more of how these panes and panels work in a future issue, when we explore GDScript. Learn to know where to look and identify the ones that confuse you. We can go over the parts we skipped in the next issue as I’ve hit my 1000 word limit already. Comments to: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org