Posted January 13 2022 9:31am

My wife's family put together a short vacation post-Christmas when they could all be together, and we spent four days in a cabin playing games and cooking amazing food for each other. While there, I decided it'd be nice to try to make a small feature I've been wanting to add to the game for a while, sort of as a souvenir of the trip. The biggest surprise was how easily it all went together.

When I first worked out level changes in Protect Your Plant, I knew there was existing code and tutorials for loading screens, but settled for setting up someone's level change code in my global script and calling Global.goto_scene("res://Level_Loading.tscn") for example. The result was that it worked, but the game locked up solid while it loaded the new level, which always bugged me a little.

I ended up taking the code from https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/530, pasting it into a new scene, giving it a progressbar for a child, and creating a new variable in the global script called destination_level. Then, because there's nothing I can't kludge, I just called my existing goto_scene function to transition to the loading screen scene.

I think the only modification I made to the example code was to add a ready(): function and add load_scene(Global.destination_level) to it. My previous setup already had each door track where on the destination level it had to go by changing the global.startpos variable, so I just had it add what level to go to as well.

I think I also got an error and changed get_tree().current_scene.free to get_tree().current_scene.call_deferred('free'). This seemed to resolve it.

The loading screen was now working great, and I spent some time adding a placeholder sprite, and an array of hints and lore to randomly display during loading. Then I tried moving from level to level and found that I had an issue with following the new level_loading script with the origional goto_scene code (which always happened, because goto_scene called level_loading, so if you loaded one level, then tried to transition to the next you got goto_scene->level_loading->goto_scene->error.

The issue looked like it involved threads and was going to take me a while to figure it out, when my brother in law looked at my code, opined that the local variable current_scene seemed out of place, and should be standardize on get_tree().current_scene. I honestly couldn't tell you why I had it set up the other way before, it's entirely possible I understood this code when I implemented it, but it's been a while and I make no promises. Either way, it worked, and saved me a ton of debugging time I used for drinking and board games instead.