Creating an icon for a custom class in editor "Create Node Menu"

Question

Hello,

I'm currently working on the look&feel of this extension: https://github.com/djiamnot/gdosc.

Is there an "official" procedure to add an icon to the editor for a custom module, without modifying the editor itself?

For the moment, i found a way to do so:

• create an icon_[my custom class].svg in the folder "editor/icons" (requires the source of the engine)
• recompile the engine
• restart the engine: if the naming is correct, icon should be displayed in the menu

Naming convention seems to be: suffix any capital with an "_" character. For the class i'm working on, named *OSCtransmitter*, the filename must be:

• icon_ (prefix)
• osctransmitter > o_ -> O, s_ -> S & ctransmitter -> Ctransmitter,
• .png (extension...)

The result is cool, but i'm certan it is not the right way of doing... Any advice or example would be welcomed :)

Answer 1

Doubt there's a proper way to do this: in the main engine, even the visual script module just has them in editor/icons and I can't see any "proper" way. It just pulls it from the editor icons theme type. So since you're making a full blown module instead of using say GDNative (on that note, unless GDNative is too restrictive for your module, using it might be better than a regular module), editor/icons is probably the best way.

If you want to hack it (arguably harder) you could try getting a hold of the editor theme and setting an icon override for the whole editor with Theme.set_icon("OSCtransmitter", "EditorIcons", texture) but keep in mind you'll have to export the SVG manually (the SVGs are exported in Godot's build process, which won't work if you go this way).

PS: when making a regular plugin with GDNative/GDScript/etc the icon is added in the EditorPlugin::add_custom_type call as documented here.

Comments

Thanks for the response, the GDNative approach seems much cleaner than the hacker way :) - I will certainly try this.

Answer 2

To set a custom icon of a custom class:

extends Node
class_name MyClass, "res://icons/my_class_icon.svg"

Comments

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html

Answer 3

For Godot 4, the format for adding an icon is thankfully more self-documenting:

@icon("res://path/to/optional/icon.svg")

About registering named classes with custom icons:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html?highlight=%40icon(#registering-named-classes

Details about creating the icons themselves:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/development/editor/creating_icons.html?highlight=%40icon(#creating-icons