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How to get nested child node without using full path? I tried with just node name, it doesn't work.
The script is on top level so the path is quite long:
dialogText = GetNodeOrNull<RichTextLabel>("VBoxContainer/Panel/MarginContainer/DialogContainer/DialogTextWrapper/DialogText");
(Question originally posed on Discord and copied here.)
The simplest way is Node.find_child(), but that does a search each time it's called which can be slow.* When you're done prototyping, you'll want to change to another method.
You could do a Unique Name.
Or an @export in gdscript or C#.
* And by slow, I mean find_child() can be so slow that the docs warn about using it:
Note: As this method walks through all the descendants of the node, it is the slowest way to get a reference to another node. Whenever possible, consider using get_node with unique names instead (see unique_name_in_owner), or caching the node references into variable.
get_node(NodePath) fetches a node & can use the NodePath can be either a relative path (from the current node) or absolute. The relative path is typically shorter. When used as a literal you can further shorten the expression to $NodePath.
So with this Player scene:
And this PlayerGun scene:
Then in order to access the somewhat deeply nested Muzzle node from within my script for Player I would do this in 3.x:
onready var muzzle = $Sprite/PlayerGun/Sprite/Muzzle
or this in 4.x:
@onready var muzzle = $Sprite/PlayerGun/Sprite/Muzzle
Because I'm using a relative path, I don't need the full / absolute path. As as a bonus, the absolute path could possible change, but as long as I don't change the relative relationship between Player and Muzzle nothing breaks.
get_node() is more performant than find_node(). find_node() has to do a pattern matching search for its target whereas get_node() uses a hash map to children (which is also how unique scene nodes work).
get_node would get nodes by name from a hash map of the children, this is also how unique scene nodes work. And, yes, find_node will do pattern matching. I could not find a direct performance comparison.
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find_node was removed to avoid misuse due to bad performance, then Scene Unique Nodes were added as a direct alternative, the reason being that people were using find_node to get nodes to prevent the code from breaking from changes in the scene tree. Although some argued that the performance wasn't a problem (you get reference once during initialization and reuse it) or that you should update the code when you change the scene tree. Ultimately find_node was restored (which eases porting from Godot 3 to 4) and subsequently renamed to find_child.
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