Instantiate vs Instantiate as gameobject

Questions & Answers
1

Prototyping a 2d action roguelike(Enter The Gungeon/Nuclear Throne influenced) and I’m trying to figure out the difference between these two lines of code, and a sample use case for both:

  1. Using Instantiate to spawn a bullet prefab

    Instantiate (bullet, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);

vs

  1. Instantiating a prefab bullet as a GameObject

    GameObject projectile = Instantiate (bullet, transform.position, Quaternion.identity) as GameObject;

I’ve been searching around, and can find similar topics but none that address this question in this fashion(however that may be because of my search terms). Appreciate any help, thank you.

2

It’s called casting, and it’s used to convert an object from one type to another. Note it’s not specific to Instantiate at all - it’s part of C#.

Instantiate returns an Object. That’s not hugely useful. So the second example casts the result as a gameobject and then assigns it to the “projectile” variable so you can do other things with it.