Best Practices

General Design

Use Components Appropriately

Create small, focused components
One responsibility per component
Avoid large monolithic scripts (Movable Component not being a good example...)
Reuse components across unit types

Event-Driven Communication

# Good: Decoupled via events
RTS_EventBus.connect("unit_selected", Callable(self, "_on_unit_selected"))

# Avoid: Direct coupling
var player = get_node("/root/Player")
player.select_unit(unit)

Cache References

# Cache component references
var health_comp: HealthComponent
var movement_comp: MovableComponent

func _ready() -> void:
    health_comp = get_node("HealthComponent")
    movement_comp = get_node("MovableComponent")

Performance

Use appropriate amount of entities

This tools works best with tens to low hundreds of units. Think SC2 sized squirmishes, not thousands of units large armies.

Optimize entities

Perfomance is heavily influence by how complex your single units are. Try

Removing any unnecessary Node3Ds (or turning them into Node if possible)
Optimize polygon, draw calls and generally try to combine meshes where possible
Reuse Area3D where possible
Track component activity using Godots profiler

Batch Operations

# Good: Process multiple at once
var paths = []
for target in destinations:
    paths.append(calculate_path(start, target))

# Avoid: Individual queries in loops
for i in range(100):
    calculate_path(start, destinations[i])  # Slow!

Also note that Gdscripts function call overhead is (relatively) pretty expensive.

Use Process Efficiently

# Only override if needed
func _process(delta: float) -> void:
    if active_state:  # Skip if not needed
        update_position(delta)

# Or use _physics_process for physics
# Or conditionally call update methods

Component Integration

Proper Initialization

99% of the time, you do want to call super._ready() when overriding components, so don't forget!

func _ready() -> void:
    super._ready()  # Call parent _ready

    health_comp = entity.health # Use entity to fetch components if possible!

    # Subscribe to events
    RTS_EventBus.connect("unit_selected", Callable(self, "_on_selected"))

    # Validate setup
    assert(health_comp != null, "Missing HealthComponent")

Graceful Cleanup

func _exit_tree() -> void:
    # Disconnect signals
    RTS_EventBus.disconnect("unit_selected", Callable(self, "_on_selected"))

    # Cancel timers
    if timer:
        timer.stop()

    # Clean up resources
    if shader_material:
        shader_material.free()

Selection & Input

Validate Selections

# Ensure units still exist before using
for unit in selected_units:
    if not is_instance_valid(unit):
        continue  # Unit was deleted

    issue_command(unit)

Testing & Debugging

Use Debug Tools

Especially for drawing paths and geometry, using a debug drawing tools such as DebugDraw3D is immensely helpful. You will actual find commented DebugDraw3D calls throughout the code.

# Add debug visualization
##DebugDraw3D.draw_aabb(aabb,debug_color)

Validate Assumptions

# Assert expected conditions
assert(unit != null, "Unit reference is null")
assert(unit.has_node("HealthComponent"), "Unit missing HealthComponent")