Raycasting with Finite State Machine?

Questions & Answers
1

I still can’t figure how dumb is the question, but that’s why I’m asking here.

In my game the player has a forward raycast which recognizes the name of the object that collides with. In a previous similar game I wrote a lot of “if” conditions (if the hit name is this, do this, if the hit name is that, do that) like a lot of times.
My question is: referring to the coding level does this suck for the computer? Could a State Machine provide brighter results? I didn’t have any hard problem with frame rates and stuff, but I’m wondering which is the “more efficient” way.
Thanks for your time!

2

If you are doing different logic for each possible object “name”, there’s only a slightly cleaner/more efficient way to do this, and that is to use a switch statement instead of an if statement since switch statements are compiled to jump tables at runtime.

E.g.:

string objectName = gameObject.name;

// Will perform every check until it finds your object name (slower).
if (objectName == "foo")
{
}
else if (objectName == "bar")
{
}

// Will jump immediatley to your object name (faster!).
switch (objectName)
{
    case "foo":
        break;
    case "bar":
        break;
}
3

Thanks a lot! Do you think is worth using this method of the “if” collection should be fine anyway? :slight_smile: