Some hints I've collected on doing things in Godot

Angle Maths

• I have a transform3d that is looking at some direction and I want to know the angle from that direction to the target how could I do that?

var looking_direction = -some_transform.basis.z
var target_direction = target.global_position - some_transform.origin
var angle_between = looking_direction.angle_to(target_direction)

https://discord.com/channels/212250894228652034/908062856459743262/1147271399065530438

Print Entire Scene Tree

print_tree()
or
print_tree_pretty()

Get root node from anywhere

get_tree().get_root()

Color Picker

The Color picker feels broken to some of us. Like if you slide the sliders all over to white, the wheel is now just . . . white.

How do I pick a color?!

Click the little OI thingy on the right and change it to "VHS Circle" and then it looks like you probably expected it to

However this will revert back every time, so go into Editor Settings and set the default under Interface->Inspector->Default Color Picker Shape

Await

First please READ THIS fully:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html#awaiting-for-signals-or-coroutines

await feels a little bit magic, because it feels like it turns a function into a magical "I will return early, but do my thing anyway" trick.

It kind of is, but here is how I look at it to make it feel less magic:

The await keyword prevents a function from continuing to the next line of code until the awaited thing finishes, BUT the function itself RETURNS immediately upon hitting the await keyword.

You have two choices when running a function containing an await line in it:

1. Do NOT ask for the return value.
2. await the function yourself, essentially chaining things.

It is a little weird that await magically causes a return "value" that you didn't specifically ask for or return, but that is what it does.
The return "value" is a coroutine. You an await THAT coroutine if you want to.

Remember that you CANNOT just get the return value of such a function without awaiting it, which the documentation you read at the beginning clearly states. So you cannot just grab and pass around a "ticking function".

TL;DR: If you want something to happen after a timer, but don't want your _read() or _process() or whatever() function to stall, put it in ANOTHER function and call THAT function, since it will just return and let you carry on.

This code will help demonstrate:

func _ready() -> void:
    print("1")
    await get_tree().create_timer(5).timeout
    print("2")
    wait_on_something()
    print("3")

func wait_on_something() -> void:
    print("4")
    await get_tree().create_timer(5).timeout
    print("5")

The result will be:

• 1
• Five second pause
• 2
• 4
• 3
• Five second pause
• 5

Notice how the wait_on_something() function is run, normally, and waited upon, so 4 happens before 3, but then when it hits await it immediately returns control to _ready() which carries on, and then much later 5 appears because wait_on_something() is still running in the background, even though we carried on without it.

Finally, this is why using await in _ready() doesn't prevent the game from continuing, and why using it in _process() will cause it to fire repeatedly, because the Godot engine itself is following this rule. It waits to finish the rest of _ready() or _process(), but it carries on with out, to run the rest of the code and/or the next instance of _process()!

Ternary-if Expressions

https://gdscript.com/tutorials/conditional-statements/

"This is a handy one-liner to assign a value to a variable based on a condition."

In other words, this is the equivalent of a "ternary" in Godot:

var x = [value] if [expression] else [value]

Code example:

var paid = false
var strength = 9.9 if paid else 1.0
print("Strength = ", strength)