Containers

AlphaGareBear

I'm not really understanding these, I think. The size of the parent is being controlled by the size of the things I'm adding to it, rather than the other way around. I can't actually make things how small I want, since I can't go smaller than a minimum size set by the things inside, even when I change their minimum size. They refuse to actually resize downward at all. Can containers only upscale things and I should start with much smaller assets? Is that the only option?

DaveTheCoder

Can you provide a specific example of the result you want?

I've often needed to make assets the desired size outside of Godot. Sometimes changing their scale property in Godot is helpful.

AlphaGareBear

It's less a real result than just understanding how they work. I thought I could throw whatever in and it'd be scaled down or up to make it fit in these containers. If I just need to be careful with the size of things I make outside, that's fine, if a little more annoying than how I thought it worked, lol.

The scaling doesn't work quite how I want, but I imagine that has more to do with VBoxContainer than anything else, since it's specifically not working how I want vertically.

DaveTheCoder

Your first post was correct. The size of the container is determined by its contents.

But the container's properties determine how the contents are positioned:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.3/tutorials/ui/gui_containers.html#using-containers

REVBENT

when i first was trying to learn UI i decided to make a calculator... that really helped a lot "click" as i tried to make the layout correct. i really do believe its more of a concept than a "do this and that, if this and that, when this and that". Once you kind of figure it out it is very rewarding imo. most the time when a container isn't sizing the way i want its because i needed add more containers, vs trying to fit them into one place. The more you move stuff around the more you will learn what does and doesn't work. Also, it's slightly janky, but using the separators can be very useful... i usually just make them invisible and use them as place holders.