enemy prefab doesn't follow Player

Questions & Answers
1

I have an enemy that works exactly how I want it too. He looks at the player and moves towards him. Once close enough, it begins attacking. Perfect. But when I create a prefab for the enemy and player, and place the player's prefab into the transform slot in the inspector for the enemy to know what to look at it gets all jacked up. I put the new prefab into the scene and it turns to where the player's position was when I created the prefab, and begins to move there. Once there, even if i move the player to the other side of the level, it begins to deal damage to the player when he's not even there. It still happens when I bring in the prefab for the main character. But the original enemy always works great. Here is my enemy AI script:

var mainChar:Transform; //a link to our main character's transform component
var theShrimpHealthCount: int = 5;
var followRange:float = 3.0; //inside this range the shrimp will FOLLOW the player.
var attackRange:float = 0.75; //inside this range the shrimp will ATTACK the player.
var moveSpeed:float = 2.0; //how fast our shrimp moves

//for attacking
var shrimpAttackDelay:float = 0.15; //how long to wait between attacks in seconds
private var nextAttack:float = 0.0; //keeps track of the time in seconds the shrimp will be able to attack next

    function Start()
    {
        transform.LookAt(mainChar);
    }

    function Update()
    {
        //get distance between shrimp.x and mainChar.x each frame
        //Mathf.Abs returns the Absolute value so we always have a positive distance

        var theDistance:float = Mathf.Abs(transform.position.x - mainChar.position.x);

        //if within our attack range
        if(theDistance <= attackRange)
        {
            Attack();
        }
        //else if within our follow range or if we have already been aggroed.
        else
        {
            //have shrimp face character
            transform.LookAt(mainChar);

            //move forward at speed
            transform.Translate(0,0,moveSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
        }
    }

    function Attack() {

        //Time.time returns the number in seconds since the game started (right now)
        //if Time.time has passed the time we set for our next attack, go ahead and attack
        if(Time.time > nextAttack && mainGamePlayScript.playerAlive == true)
        {
            //Reference main game play script and subtract 1 from the health count
            mainGamePlayScript.theHealthCount  --;
            if(mainGamePlayScript.theHealthCount <= 0)
            {
                mainGamePlayScript.playerAlive = false;
            }
            //now that we have attacked, we need to reset our next attack variable.
            //we want it to be (attackDelay) seconds from right now
            nextAttack = Time.time + shrimpAttackDelay;
        }

    }

    function hurtShrimp(Damage: int)
    {
        theShrimpHealthCount -= Damage;

        if(theShrimpHealthCount <= 0)
            {
                Destroy(gameObject);
                mainGamePlayScript.theScoreCount ++;
            }
    }
2

The problem is that even though you've instantiated both the enemy and the player from their prefabs, Unity doesn't know that you want the enemy's "mainChar" variable to refer to the player instance, rather than the player prefab. (Sometimes it's really useful to have in-scene objects hold references to prefabs).

You need some other way to wire the enemy up to the player. I'd recommend that you tag the player with "Player", and then in the enemy's Start() method, use GameObject.FindWithTag("Player") to get the in-scene player object. That way, each enemy will automatically wire itself up to the player whenever it starts doing things, instead of you needing to manage the wiring manually.

3

Another explaination:

var mainChar:Transform; //a link to our main character's transform component

is set when the script initializes only. Then it has that value for the rest of the game.

Put it in your update or fixedupdate and it should follow just fine.