Is it possible to instantiate child nodes without declaring extensions?

[pthm]

For example when creating a camera controller class

type ThirdPersonCameraController struct {
	Node3D.Extension[ThirdPersonCameraController] `gd:"ThirdPersonCameraController"`

	SpringArm SpringArm3D.Instance `gd:"SpringArm"`
	Camera    Camera3D.Instance    `gd:"SpringArm/Camera"`
}

When adding this node into a scene it's instantiated like so

I would like to have the camera as a child node of the spring arm, to workaround this I have resorted to removing the reference to the camera in the controller struct and creating an instance at runtime

func (c *ThirdPersonCameraController) Ready() {
	Input.SetMouseMode(Input.MouseModeCaptured)
	c.SpringArm.AsNode().AddChild(Camera3D.New().AsNode())
}

Is is possible with the struct tags or some other means to create the camera as a child of the spring arm and maintain its reference on the controller struct without declaring a new struct as an extension of the spring arm with an embedded camera?

[Splizard]

Yes, I think the intent, is for, by including a path in the struct tag in your example (SpringArm/Camera), this should work as expected but the automatic children instantiation doesn't handle arbitrary paths yet, so it will use SpringArm/Camera if it already exists but otherwise I think currently it's being created directly as a child as you've observed. There's some nuances to sort out here, do we create plain nodes if there is no existing node for parents? ie. SpringArm/SomethingElse/Camera.

Note that there is another way to do this which is supported at the moment:

type ThirdPersonCameraController struct {
	Node3D.Extension[ThirdPersonCameraController] `gd:"ThirdPersonCameraController"`

	SpringArm struct {
                SpringArm3D.Instance

	        Camera    Camera3D.Instance
	}
}

This will replicate the node structure from the struct to the scene.

[pthm]

If the nested anonymous struct works as expected that sounds good enough, extrapolating structure from the tags seems like it could be brittle.

Ill try this out when I get home

[pthm]

Tested and that works nicely, thank you