Object instantiates in different position than stated

Questions & Answers
1

The weirdest thing is happening and after an hour of debugging I’ve given up and decided to ask here.

I am spawning an object fireball to my game world like so:

Instantiate(fireBall, new Vector3(fireBallSpawn.position.x, fireBallSpawn.position.y, fireBallSpawn.position.z), transform.rotation);

fireBallSpawn is a transform that I assigned in the inspector. It is an empty game object that is offset by (0, 1.7, 1) from the player (one unit in front of his face basically). Then a different script takes over and moves the spawned ball forward.

fireBall is a simple prefab of a red sphere

Even before getting to this second script, the ball tends to move to a minus position on the z axis. There is no code in between spawning and moving it, thus the error/bug must be somewhere at instantiation.

The thing is that is only happens sometimes! It’s driving me nuts. If I keep instantiating over and over it will sometimes be in the proper location, and sometimes under the floor.

What am I doing wrong?

Debugging screenshot of a situation where the placement is wrong:
(The 0.0 -3.5 1.0 is the location of my fireBallSpawn. How is this possible?!)

43426-screen1.png
43426-screen1.png1920×1080 380 KB

This is the instantiating code that you see in the picture as well:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class PlayerAttack : MonoBehaviour
{

    PlayerSelection PS;
    public GameObject fireBall;
	public Transform fireBallSpawn;

	float nextFire = 0f;
	public float cooldownTime = 0.5f;
	

    void Start()
    {
        PS = GetComponent<PlayerSelection>();
    }

    void Update()
    {
        if(Input.GetKey (KeyCode.E))
        {
            //if   target present    and    we may fire (again)
			if(PS.selectedGO != null && Time.time > nextFire)
            {
                nextFire = Time.time + cooldownTime;

				Instantiate(fireBall, 
				            new Vector3(fireBallSpawn.position.x, fireBallSpawn.position.y, fireBallSpawn.position.z), 
				            transform.rotation);
            }
        }
    }
}

EDIT: NOW IT IS WORKING. I changed the code to this:

Vector3 spawnPos = new Vector3(fireBallSpawn.transform.position.x, 
                               fireBallSpawn.transform.position.y, 
                               fireBallSpawn.transform.position.z );

Instantiate(fireBallPrefab, spawnPos, transform.rotation)

I am completely lost as to WHY it works and if anyone knows please clarify or tell me what I don’t understand, because to me this is the exact same as before only more lines.

2

what about

Instantiate(fireBall, transform.position, transform.rotation);

???

3

From what I can see, you need to be using fireBallSpawn.transform.localPosition instead of just position. Same goes for rotation as well. If it’s not the root gameObject/Transform, you will almost always need to use localPosition/Rotation.