user friendly solution to add_child() or instance() for quick testing or simple games

[yankscally]

Concept 1: an instance node that is 'hidden' at the start but is loaded the same as onready var etc. This adds 4 set players to a scene. If no Vector is given, it could use its placement in the world scene as default.

WORLD.gd
var count = 0
var players [
     $instanceNodeP1,
     $instanceNodeP2,
     $instanceNodeP3,
     $instanceNodeP3,
     ]
func _delta():
    if Input.is_action_just_pressed("start"):

        instance_in(player[count], self, Vector3(0, 20, 0))
        count += 1

concept 2: spawning the same bullet a bunch of times

func _delta():
    if Input.is_action_just_pressed("shoot"):
        $instanceNode.instance_at(self)

honestly, these are only suggestions. I'm sure there are lots of ways to make the tree relations and instancing things into the scene a little easier, but it would be nice to have the editor do some of the work like, yeah it makes sense to spawn this arrow directly from this bow. GDScript code is really nice to use but instancing seems to feel really difficult. its something I struggle with a lot in Godot and it feels like thats where I get the most problems as a beginner. As a result in a 2D game I used show() and hide() so much that the title screen is embedded in the map. I felt like I was supposed to know how to instance properly but the workflow always catches me out somewhere and I spend more time fixing that, and most of the code is hard to read. Its also difficult to visualise adding nodes to a tree.

[eon-s]

Like InstancePlaceholder.create_instance()?

InstancePlaceholder is meant to be used in the editor but can be used in other ways too.

Also, Node has the method replace_by where you can just swap your own placeholders by instances of nodes like in the Scene dock.

[Zireael07]

InstancePlaceholder looks like another poorly known and poorly documented thing... :(

[eon-s]

yes, and has issues with things like signals and groups, which is something that this kind of proposal need to discuss about how to solve it.

[yankscally]

something like

$Bullet.instance_at($Gun)

would be really nice