godot-addon-cables

A Godot plugin to serve as an alternative to Autoload Event Buses for a more visual / editor gameplay design approach.

The implementation of this addon is very much inspired by Ryan Hipple's 2017 Talk on using Unity ScriptableObjects as an alternative to singletons.

Usage

The general flow for usage is:

1. Right-click on any folder in the FileSystem tab > Create New > Resource...
2. Search for Cable > click Create
3. Name your Cable something useful like player_death_event.tres or player_health_value.tres
4. Produce values on the cable - this can be done by either producing a value on a Cable directly via notify() (e.g. for primitive values like float,string,int,bool etc), or using a CableValueProducer node to emit events / data on the cable. (NOTE: the producer should generally be a child of the node that is producing the value)
5. Consume values from the cable - this can be done by adding the CableValueConsumer node as a child of the node that wishes to consume value updates

Available Producer Types:

1. CableNodeValueProducer - sends Node references across the Cable, and automatically clears the reference when the producer gets destroyed
2. CableButtonEventProduer - translates a button click into a Cable event; useful for quickly wiring up UI across scenes
3. CableInputEventProducer - translates input actions into Cable events; this is more niche, but can help cover some edge cases for prototyping

See the examples folder for more granular implementation details

Best Practices

It is best to use Cable resources for global state, such has passing data to UI components (e.g. player health ratio to a healthbar widget) or sharing atomic data like enemy count, number of coins, or even a shared node reference to a manager script that holds these.

You should not use Cable resources when transferring local state, such as watching a single monster's CollisionShape2D.area_entered event to apply damage to the monster (e.g., multiple instances of the monster scene will all broadcast on the same assigned Cable resource).