Reasoning behind the Scenes autoload

The Scenes autoload is just that: an autoload with a lot of exported PackedScene variables, that I use to keep track of all the scenes that need to be instantiated from code.

I started to include it in every project because I tend to move stuff around a lot during development, thus breaking most of the load("res://path/to/my_resource.tres") statements.

The only problem I found with this approach is that I end up with a huge list of scenes which is hard to navigate.

Thankfully Godot 4 introduced separators for exported variables, so this shouldn’t be an issue in the future.

Detecting Unassigned Variables

This should have been it, but I found out that I often forget to assign a scene to the newly created exported variable, and only realize it later on while running the game.

To solve that issue I added this nifty bit in the _ready function to crash the game instantly if there is an unassigned member variable of type PackedScene:

func _ready():
  for p in get_property_list():
    if p["class_name"] == "PackedScene":
      assert(self[p["name"]], "Scene << %s >> was not set!" % p["name"])