Godot - How Are Scenes Handled Outside of the Viewport?

Question

In the Godot Engine, I am wondering what happens when objects/scenes leave the viewport? For example: I am trying to make a large map with lots of scenes/entities (such as multiple moving enemies, as well as resource nodes). I am trying to figure out the best way to handle the entities that no longer need to be loaded in memory.

My initial thought was that every tile that is moved to, check the "map" array that holds all the tiles and load the new ones off the screen a little, and vice versa for the ones that will disappear. I assume this is horrible practice. I also thought of having "regions" that once entered, could load upcoming sections - but that also gets super complicated.

Answer 1

I noticed that Godot is already handling part of this problem. As an example, when an object emitting particles leaves the viewport, it stops emitting particles.

Globally performancewise, having multiple instances shouldn't be a problem, but if you have a lot of entities, you may want to execute code only when they are in viewport.

For instance :

  if(isInViewport):  
      Do everything
  Else: 
      Do nothing but exist

To that purpose the VisibilityNotifier2D class may be usefull.