I may be putting the cart before the horse a little bit, but I'd like to get thinking about a few things before I really get started.
I am new to game development and godot, and will be spending the next few weeks learning basics, then I will start working on my (overly) ambitious project, and would like to learn some about some 'physics' (or anything resembling my desired outcome) based scripts and plugins, etc.
A few more details: I plan on making a low poly 3d magic based games which generates "realistic" like effects from the potentially massive amounts of energy involved with powerful magic. I envision the levels being made of layers of hexagonal tiles which are destructible, and changeable depending on player/enemy actions, like superheating stone into magma, combusting plants, electrifying water, etc
Are there any good resources you know of that will help with this?
What special considerations should be made as "day 0" choices?
Are there any choices early on which could make development go more smoothly?
And again, the cart is before the horse, and this is overly ambitious, but these will be issues eventually.
#3d physics and godot
sonic wave
dawn knoll
The first thing, if you're new to coding, would be learning the basics of programming itself. For absolute begginers some courses using java or python seem to be good introductions. Keep in mind coding is just learning how to use code to apply programming logic, so you need programming knowledge first.
GridMap, the class for cell-based coordinates, does not support hexagonal tiling yet. So you'd have to create your own hexagonal coordinate system for placing the terrain. There's probably some math online if you google it.
For animations you have the powerful but very manual AnimationPlayer. But you can use it by creating and animating models in blender, which then get automatically imported as a scene with the AnimationPlayer already setup (with the blender animations).
You also have a pretty robust particle system with the CPU/GPUParticle3D nodes.
For manual (code-based) animations you have Tweens which help alter values over time.
As for plugins, there's nothing essential. If you use external tools there may be some plugins to facilitate the workflow, but that's mostly it.
sonic wave
Ok thanks that's a good direction
Will animationplayer be able to handle explosions and stuff or is it more for character movements?
dawn knoll
AnimationPlayer can change any value and call any function from a timeline. So it can handle pretty much everything, but it doesn't draw anything by itself.
What you can do is make it control a player's model or a particle node.
sonic wave
Oh ok cool I love all the little features, shame about the grid lack of hex function, I really don't want to make a cube tile game cause if it's 3d you either need a ton of little cubes or it looks like Minecraft
dawn knoll
The GridMap just facilitates placing down objects on a grid. But you don't need it.
TileMapLayer does support hexagonal positions iirc, but it is 2D.
You can still use it to generate a flat hexagonal grid in 3D. You can then rise the hexagons higher or lower separately from the TileMap's coordinates.