Awaiting for Godot

Godot offers a rich set of Animation Tooling. It helps you to move things, size them and alter pretty much any node property you can think of. But those animations don't run in a vacuum. After they run you may want to run other code.

But how do you know when the animation has finished?

Awaiting signals

Using C# I can await signals with the await ToSignal(...); method. ToSignal() listens to the signals from the Node passed in as the first argument. In this case I'd like to listen to the _animationPlayer. The second argument determines the signal to listen to. In this case I'd like to wait until the triggered animation has finished. We can do that by listening to the animation_finished signal on the _animationPlayer.

As ToSignal() runs asynchronously, we need to wrap our code in a function that uses the async keyword. Otherwise, we can't use await. After awaiting the function we can make our main character disappear or run any other code. The world is your oyster. 🦪

private async void Kill()
{
    _animationPlayer.Play("Die");
    await ToSignal(_animationPlayer, "animation_finished");
    _character.Visible = false

}

There are also other ways to execute code after a signal has been triggered. For example through adding a Call Method Track in your AnimationPlayer. On this track you can call methods from your nodes and other scripts.

But I would argue that ToSignal() creates more readable code as the logical flow is traceable line by line, without having to jump to the AnimationPlayer in Godot.