Do not show the eye icon for visible nodes in the Scene Tree view

[npinsker]

Describe the project you are working on

Games

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

There is an eye symbol next to (almost) every Node in the Scene Tree view. When there are lots of nodes, this means lots of symbols. They draw the eye, and contribute (a little) to making the editor feel more cluttered.

I don't think toggling visibility is so common that it deserves such prominent placement in the engine, and we could remove the eye icons and clean up the look a little bit. When needed, toggling visibility can be done via the Inspector, which will be made even easier with the upcoming godotengine/godot#97415.

If that's too cumbersome, alternate solutions could involve adding a toggle to the right-click menu for that node, or providing a top-level checkbox in the Inspector like Unity:

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation

Remove the eye icon for visible nodes. (Invisible nodes will be unaffected)

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams

• If a node is visible, show no eye icon.
• If a node is invisible, show the closed eye icon, as before.
• (possibly) Add an option to the right-click context menu to toggle visibility.

Visibility can already be changed through the Inspector.

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?

Will be used constantly, in that it will simplify the look of the editor

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?

It affects every project

[npinsker]

FWIW: Unity & Unreal Engine 5 use color (white/gray) to denote visibility. Unreal 5 has an eye icon that's only displayed on hover. Unreal Engine 4 & Game Maker use always-visible eye icons.

[Calinou]

We currently don't have a system in place to only show specific TreeItem icons on hover, so this would have to be implemented first. See also #7160.

[npinsker]

Hovering would also be a more complicated UX problem here because Unreal has a dedicated column for visibility, while the most naive Godot impl would push the other right-aligned icons around in an awkward way.

[Calinou]

If we don't show a visible eye icon on hover, then discoverability will suffer unless you try to click in the invisible area that formerly contained the icon. I assume clicking that area would allow toggling visibility even if invisible, since the closed eye icon would appear there if visible is false. It would also still take up horizontal space in the Scene tree dock.

I wouldn't remove the ability to toggle visibility from the scene tree dock, since it's often used to focus on specific nodes while working (and allows toggling visibility without having to switch views in the inspector).