Question About Object Pooling Components

Unity Engine
,
1

I’m following this Brakeys tutorial on object pooling:

And here is what my method that initially instantiates the objects looks like:

private void Start()
    {
        poolDictionary = new Dictionary<string, Queue<PooledUIObject>>();

        foreach (UIPool pool in pools)
        {
            Queue<PooledUIObject> objectPool = new Queue<PooledUIObject>();

            for (int i = 0; i < pool.size; i++)
            {
                GameObject obj = Instantiate(pool.pooledObject.gameObject, this.transform);

                PooledUIObject pooledObject = obj.GetComponent<PooledUIObject>();

                pooledObject.gameObject.SetActive(false);
                objectPool.Enqueue(pooledObject);
            }

            poolDictionary.Add(pool.tag, objectPool);
        }
    }

It’s all working well, but I’m wondering, is there any way to avoid the GetComponent call when doing something like this?

I want the PooledUIObject component because that holds the text and image that I want to have access to but when I instantiate something it always just returns a GameObject, so is there any way, using this object pooling technique, to avoid the (potentially hundreds) GetComponent calls?

2

Instead of calling Instantiate like this:

GameObject obj = Instantiate(pool.pooledObject.gameObject, this.transform);

Can you call it like this?

PooledUIObject pooledObject = Instantiate(pool.pooledObject, this.transform);
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3

Thanks perfect, thank you! For some reason I was under the impression that Instantiate always returned GameObjects. Thanks again!

4

Does this actually save the performance cost of GetComponent, or does it just call GetComponent under the hood?

5

Probably just calls it under the hood. But the performance cost of GetComponent is overblown anyway.

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