Accessing a variable from another script without using GetComponent<> c#

Questions & Answers
1

Here is the situation. I have a bullet prefab that alters the movement speed of any object with a certain tag. But all the enemies have different movement scripts attached to them. I have the speed variable named exactly the same on every enemy movement script.

so my question is, is there a way for my bullet prefab to look for a particular variable on a gameobject, without Getcomponent. The Reasoning is that i do not want my bullets prefab script to have to run through countless if statements on a collision to find the correct enemy movement script to access the speed variable.

In a perfect case I would like to say something like,

OnCollisionEnter(Collision other)
{
if(other.tag == “Something”)
{
“get access to the the speed variable of the other gameobject”
}
}

2

You could make all of your enemy scripts child classes of a general Enemy class (i.e. make Enemy extend MonoBehaviour and individual enemy types extend Enemy), then define a getSpeed() method on Enemy and override that function in the subclass scripts. Then just have your bullet script do

Enemy enemyScript = other.GetComponent<Enemy>();
if (enemyScript != null)
{
	speed = enemyScript.getSpeed();
}

If you’re not familiar with this sort of thing, this is called Polymorphism and it’s an important part of C# and other object-oriented languages. Unity provides a few video scripting tutorials on it: see Intermediate Gameplay Scripting; Inheritance, Polymorphism, Member Hiding, Overriding, and probably Interfaces as well.