SwiftGodotAssets

What is SwiftGodotAssets?

SwiftGodotAssets is a tool to generate (at compile time) static asset variables that can be used to access resources (images, meshes, scenes etc) within a SwiftGodot project. So instead of dealing with a bunch of paths and having to do all the work related keeping those up to date, or finding the paths are broken due to moves and deletions you can instead just use compile-time code that updates and tells you things are broken.

TL;DR: If you use resources using SwiftGodot assets you can have more compile-time reliability in regards to resources in your Godot project.

Code generated will be something like

public enum Scenes {
    public static let characterScene: AssetScene<CustomSceneType> = Asset(path: "res://Scenes/Character.tscn")
}

Which would then be referred to in code:

let sceneInstance = Scenes.characterScene.instantiate()
self.addChild(node: sceneInstance)

A couple notes are:

If an asset is deleted or moved in your Godot project it could give a runtime error when it's not found.
If an asset is deleted and then things are recompiled this will throw a compile error instead.

Setup

1. Configuration file

SwiftGodotAssets needs to know the project location and the types we are supposed to cover.

The plugin needs to know the root of the godot project it's generating the files for as well as the user's specific needs in terms of what kind of file types to generate assets for.

This is accomplished by creating a configuration file at the root of your SwiftPackage called AssetGeneratorConfiguration.json. This should have a simple configuration

{
    "asset_path": "<The path to your Godot project root>",
    "asset_types": "<The asset types you want to generate assets for*>",
}

*The asset types are a string that is a comma seperated list of elements with these options image,mesh,scene,script,shader,shader_material,resource. See below for more details.

2. Add this project as a dependency in your swift package

.package(url: "https://github.com/nvanfleet/SwiftGodotAssets.git", branch: "main"),

Don't forget to add SwiftGodotAssets to your target that uses it.

3. I have had some challenges getting the generated code accessible to my app and also if it's in its own

target that removes the ability to interpret scene files that have Custom class types from your app or other depenencies.

So for now I create a softlink (alias) for the directory of the generated code into my swift source code directory. This allows the generated code to just be part of my project.

ln -s <SwiftGodotDirectory>/build/plugins/outputs/swiftgodotassets/SwiftGodotAssets/SwiftGodotAssetsPlugin/GeneratedSources <SwiftGodotDirectory><SwiftSourceGodotDirectory>/Generated

Supported types

There is a set of supported types for asset generation. This is probably not exhaustive of all the types that are feasibly supported and more can be added.

Image

Types: jpg, jpeg, gif, png Result: Assets of type CompressedTexture2D

Mesh

Types: glb, obj Result: Assets of type Mesh

Scene

Types: tscn Result: Assets based on a search of the tscn file which can pull out custom types or specific built in types.

Script

Types: gd Result: Assets of type Script

Shader

Types: gdshader Result: Assets of type Shader

ShaderMaterials

Types: gdshader Result: This looks at the shader files in your resources and generates a custom ShaderMaterial class that is named after the shader. It then auto-generates get and set APIs on that class to allow for type-safe control of the shader values.

Resource

Types: tres Result: Assets of type Resource. Since tres files are rather generic I am not sure they could be more specific (maybe there can be some determination).

nvanfleet / SwiftGodotAssets