This is a dynamic zone loading system for Godot that takes care of the zone management for you, loading and unloading zones as your player explores the world, using a background thread to minimize performance hiccups. This allows to have huge seamless worlds without loading screen.

This system is for handcrafted zones like in a FPS, Adventure game or 2D game. It is not a chunk system based on distance to the player.

How it works: a zone is attached to the tree when the player enters the zone trigger (that should be bigger than the zone) and detached when the player exits the trigger. Zones are preloaded and preinstanced one zone in advance so there is no loading lag.

This system works in 2D and 3D (see demo) and can be used for indoor and outdoor environments. In 3D, zones need to be carfully designed so that player cannot see unloaded zones (needs twists and turns or fog).

• Every zone sits inside a trigger area that completely encompasses the zone.
• When the player enters a trigger area, the corresponding zone is loaded, instanced (if not already) and attached to the world.
• When the player exits the area, the zone is removed from the tree but stays in memory, allowing to go back and forth quickly between two zones. When the zone is not directly connected to an area the player is in, it is freed from memory and unloaded.
• Zones that are connected to the current zone(s) are automatically loaded in memory and instanced in background, so that they are ready when the player enters a new zone. Connected zones are zones that are overlapping the current zone, this is detected automatically, no need to register the connections.

• Good if loading the whole world at once would take too much time/memory.
• Allows huge seamless worlds without loading screen.
• Works for 2D and 3D.

• Useless if your whole world can be quickly loaded in memory, or if you don't mind loading screens.
• Need to manually split the game world into zones and set triggers.
• In 3D, zones need to be carfully designed so that player cannot see unloaded zones (needs twists and turns or fog).

• For 2D, add an Area2D to your player's camera with a collision shape covering the whole screen. This way zones will be loaded when they become visible on screen.
• For 3D, add an Area to your player's camera with a collision shape encompassing the player.
• Set the area's collision mask to "zone_triggers" (leave collision layer empty), this way the area will collide only with zone triggers.
• Assign your player scene to the world's "Player Scene" attribute, it will be automatically spawned on world load, at the location of a node in the group PLAYER_SPAWN.

• Create a zone, save it as a separate scene.
• Create a new node under World/ZoneLoader, name it with your zone name.
• Attach the script zone.gd to the node
• Set the zone path in the inspector
• Click the checkbox "Preview" to make the zone visible
• Move the zone node where you want it to be relative to the other zones
• Add a new Area (or Area2D) node as child, name it ZoneTrigger
• Set the collision layer and mask to zone_triggers
• Add one or more collision shapes that encompasses the zone, the zone will be loaded when the player enters this area

Done. Now the zone will be loaded, instanced and attached to the tree automatically by the system.

Here is the

• New shaders are being compiled. Limit the number of different shader you use and use a shader cache to precompile the shaders during loading screen.
• outputting to the console using print() and errors can create stutters.

• Can happen when exiting and reentering a zone in 3D, this is a bug in Godot.
• Will be fixed in next release, hopefully: godotengine/godot#41470

• You need to save your zone data when it is unloaded and restore it when the zone is loaded.

You can leave comments here: Yogoda#3

You are free to submit issues, contribute and improve this template, this is a Creative Commons

Big thanks to rmvermeulen and Wrzlprnft for their contributions!