Minor issue with global scenes

darthpejka

Hi folks!
So I have a bit of a conundrum. I use quite a few global autoloads in my game, and what I noticed is that if I autoload a pure script, there's generally no issue. The script has no class name, but I can safely reference methods and properties using it's global name.
However, if I autoload a .tscn scene, the compiler suddenly issues a warning when accessing it's methods or properties. The code editor does not raise warnings, which is what I think makes sense, since the given script is attached to the scene directly.

The reason this is an issue is mostly just because it's cumbersome and it clutters the codebase if I mark these instances with a @warning_ignore, and I don't want to disable the base warning. If not for this, I would actually have all unsafe method and property accesses treated as errors.
Is there some way to make the compiler understand this link between a global scene and the attached script? Is this a bug? Is this intended behaviour and I'm forced to either use pure script autoloads or pepper my codebase with ignore annotations?

DaveTheCoder

darthpejka if I autoload a .tscn scene

How do you do that? I know how to create an autoloaded node that has an attached script, but not a .tscn scene.

darthpejka

DaveTheCoder
It's basically the same though. Autoloading just creates a Node instance from whatever you provide and adds it to the root, be it a scene or a script file. AFAIK you can add anything, even graphics and Godot will try to render it as best as it can. I just found it useful to organize my sounds since I have a lot of different sounds and sounds variants and I use the stream randomizer a lot. And to hold references to PackedScenes via @export.

Toxe

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Toxe

You could do it like this.

Create your scene Foo and attach a script foo.gd.

# foo.gd
class_name Foo extends Node2D

var number := 42

Autoload the scene with a different node name (Bar).

And then you can access your node for example in your main scene.

func _ready() -> void:
    print(($/root/Bar as Foo).number)

    var my_foo: Foo = $/root/Bar
    print(my_foo.number)

But again, I don't really know why you'd want to do that.

darthpejka

Toxe
Oh, right, forgot to mention in my original post that I also had this for a while. You don't even need the $/root, just (Bar as Foo) works, but IMHO it's also just clutter, like @warning_ignore. Also the name has to be different from the class name, which adds additional effort (I constantly had to look up which name is the class name and which is the global name), so it's far from ideal.
Like I said, I use this construct to handle sounds and music, since it's easier to have them organized and set up as a scene in the editor.
My main point of contention is that the code editor does recognise that the calls to such a global scene are valid, it's only when running the project that I get a warning, which is baffling.