What's the point of plugins?

Question

I wanted to create my own "unit" object based on KinematicBody2D, and then use it to make other objects that will inherit from the "unit".

BUT, when I add a "unit" node to the scene, it already contains a script.

What's the point of plugins then?
Doesn't that violate the whole concept?
There is a "Node", "Node2d" is inherited from it, "KinematicBody2D" is inherited from "Node2d". So why does the created plugin lose the meaning of inheriting one node from another?

Answer 1

It doesn't violate the concept, and you can still inherit from the custom node script instead of changing it directly or replacing it: Just right-click on the newly added Unit and select "extend script". The newly created script will start with something like

extends "res://Unit.gd"

and you will be able to use all functions of Unit.gd plus whatever you add in your extension.

Comments

Hmm, a little confusing. The main thing is that it works.
Okay, thanks a lot, tovarishch!

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One more question.
I want to make several child plugins on the basis of my "unit" plugin, for example "player" and "enemy". How do I add child classes to the hierarchy so that they appear as inherited from the "unit" class?

Of course, I can leave them in the "kinematicbody2d" branch, but I would like it to be beautiful

func _enter_tree():
add_custom_type("Player1",
    "KinematicBody2D",
    preload("res://addons/player1/player1.gd"),
    preload("res://addons/unit/ico_unit.png"))

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I never tried it, but shouldn't it be enough to assign "Unit" as base node, like so?

func _enter_tree():
    add_custom_type("Player1",
        "Unit",
        preload("res://addons/player1/player1.gd"),
        preload("res://addons/unit/ico_unit.png"))

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Alas, it doesn't work. I tried to prescribe different options, but nothing helps((

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Ok, I played around a bit and finally got it to work with the following approach:

Do not use addcustomtype, but register your custom scripts as classes instead, with

class_name Unit, "unit_icon.png"

and

extends Unit
class_name Player, "player_icon.png"

There're some other disadvantages with this approach (described in https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1876), but at least the hierarchical display in the node selection works as expected.

The good news is: The developers are well aware of the mess they created with the two different approaches, and @willnationsdev is already working on a redesign for 4.0: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/22

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Thank you very much! I will try!