That depends on if they already know the unique behavior in gdscript. By typing range, by being explicit, you don’t make that assumption. You lower the pre-existing knowledge required to quickly comprehend the code. That’s the definition readability.

In this case, The extra expense in time and storage bytes of typing `range(10)` versus `10` in that for loop is worth it. I’d always rather be explicit in my code, because I know others are going to read it. (Future me always counts as other).

Using these one-off contextual syntax features (made up term) means anyone reading the code need to remember all of these special cases to understand the code. The fewer of these features you use, the less esoteric knowledge of the language your reviewer needs. That’s a good thing.

It’s not about English, it’s about the common constructs used across similar languages. If you see the bare token `10` in the code it is an integer, not a string. Except in this case, if it’s in the context of a for loop, it’s now a range. Does that mean `len(10)==10`, or is it just this one case?

Generally, clever language syntax features result in decreased comprehension. They’re specifically used for code obfuscation because they are hard to reason about.

It’s not a common construct across languages. For someone who doesn’t know this feature specific to gdscript, they’re going to read “for i in 10”, as opposed to “for in range up to 10”. Putting the explicit range in there makes it clear there is a range.

This is a clever shortcut that results in less readable code.

Just take the time to type out range(). Making it explicit is going to be more clear when you’re staring at that loop again next month. Well, maybe not specifically that one, but you know, another one. That does things. Important things

I hit a bug in Godot’s importer for blender vertex colors. Simple solution was to export to gltf first. Instead, I took Blender Studio’s DOGWALK repo, did a deep dive on their workflow and export/import code. I am now on day eight of rearchitecting my project based on the findings.
This is fine.

It’s important to me to see exactly what will be shown in the game when I’m working in Blender.

At some point I’ll do a long write up of everything I had to change to just make the colors match in both programs. That was a learning experience.

Background on this is I’m using Blender for all modeling, animation, and level design because the tools over there are just better. I have a workflow for importing everything into Godot, but as I do new things (multi-texture painted terrain now), I have to implement shader/material on both sides.

Unsurprisingly, the video compression killed all details on the trees. Maybe that's the sign to go with real geometry to reduce noise?

4.4.3 didn’t work that way for me. Even tracing the file accesses of blender, it wasn’t looking at the `blender_manifest.toml` within the local repo directory. But if I packaged up the extension into a zip, then used blender to install it to the local repo, it worked. Very strange.

I got it sorted. You can’t just supply a directory with your extensions in it. You have to set up the local repository, then install the extensions into it. The end result looks the same, but there’s definitely something being changed during install.

Do you have a documentation reference for the proper directory layout for the local extensions repository? I’ve been banging my head on setting this up, but my extensions just aren’t being accepted. All the official docs focus on remote repos.

Watching the whole video and softly mumbling to myself, “who’s the fiercest little mana beast?”

That’s how I did the quick “rule out” test. Bought a pack and started playing. Although it looks great in the video, the game has a top-down angle with a minimum distance. I’m going to need to play with effect angles and shapes to be readable.

I’m excited that the combination of 2d animation on 3d looks awesome. Less excited at the prospect of hand animating all of the spell effects in my RPG.
Here’s my rough attempt from tonight, using the original explosion as a reference. Yup, this’ll be great!