Safe Strings For Godot 4 Mono

This plugin tries to kill the need of most magic strings and adds some extra functionalities.

💭 Setup:

• Copy the addons folder of this repository and paste it in your Godot 4 mono project.
• Enable the SafeStrings plugin.
• Add using SafeStrings; to all your scipts or just add a global using for it.

🕹️ Input Actions:

The first improvement is about Godot's input actions. A static class called InputAction will get generated automatically, it will contain a static readonly StringName for each input action added in the project settings input map.

Input.IsActionPressed("action_name");
// Becomes
Input.IsActionPressed(InputAction.ActionName);

📂 Resource Paths:

A static class called Res will get generated it will contain other static classes for each folder to recreate the resource file structure. These classes will also contain fields of the ResourcePath<T> class for every resource.

The ResourcePath<T> class can be implicity converted to a string, just like e.g. StringName. The generic type T is the type of the resource where it points to. It has a property of the T type called Value, getting it will return the resource where it's pointing to, it also caches automatically. Use Preload() to load the cache (you do not need to do that).

Example:

Res.Enemies.zombie_tscn.Value.Instantiate();

Relative Paths:

If you have a file structure where for example the player script is in the same folder as the player scene, this feature will be useful.

Select your script and click on Project/Tools/SafeStrings/Generate Rel Using or press ctrl + alt + r and this line of code will get generated:

using Rel = SafeStrings.Res.Examples.Player;

So now you can do something like:

public static Player NewPlayer()
{
    return Rel.player_tscn.Value.Instantiate<Player>();
}

🪵 Node Paths:

You can associate a scene to a script using Project/Tools/SafeStrings/Associate Scene to script Or press ctrl + alt + s.

Than a window will popup where you associate a scene to a script. By default the scene field will be set to the currently open scene and the script to the one attached to the root node.

When a scene is associated the plugin will add a static class called Scene to the given script class. This class will have static subclasses that are recreating the scene structure (one subclass for every node).

Every "Node" class will have a static property called Path wich is of the SceneNodePath<T> type.

The SceneNodePath<T> class is a wrapper around the NodePath class.

• T is the type of the node where the path. GetType() returns the type of T.
• Implicity convertable to NodePath.
• Get(Node root) method is similar to Node.GetNode<T>(NodePath path).
• GetCached(Node root) is like Get but will cache the result in a ConditionalWeakTable.

Every 'Node' class will also have methods, Get(Node root) and GetCached(Node root), these are just shortcuts for methods on Path.

Examples:

Scene.NodeName.ChildOfNodeName.Get(this).SomeMethod();
// Same as 
this.GetNode<NodeType>("NodeName/ChildOfNodeName").SomeMethod();
// Or
this.GetNode<NodeType>(Scene.NodeName.ChildOfNodeName.Path).SomeMethod();

When you wanna use a Node more often (e.g. in the _Process function) it's a good practise to cache it. I always liked to use lazy getters with the null-coalescing-operator instead of setting a node reference in the _Ready() function.

It looked something like this:

private NodeType _myNode;

public MyNode => _myNode ??= GetNode<NodeType>("Node/MyNode"); // Scene.Node.MyNode.Get(this);

But with this plugin I can just do this:

public MyNode => Scene.Node.MyNode.GetCached(this);

It's kind of like @onready ... get_node in gdscript but instead of assigning the field on ready it assigns it at the first use.

You can instantiate a associated scene by calling the Instantiate() method on the script type. You can also add a OnInstanced() method:

public void OnInstanced()
{
    // Called When Player.Instantiate() was called
}

Contributing:

I'd love to see a PR.