I’m having a real problem with scripting and I can’t figure out the solution by myself.
I have a script that ‘creates’ the scene, everything is created programmatically, I’ve added that script to the camera, it also creates the object that the camera should follow.
The problem is, I can’t find a way to ‘pass’ that GameObject to another script on the same Camera other than calling GetComponent inside Update() what doesn’t seem very efficient at all. Of course I could check if the var is null inside Update() but that’s bad practice. The proper way imho is to set the variable on Start(). I don’t know if this have something to do with the other script loading first or whatever.
This is something common I do a lot. I create a C# properly, and if I am accessing it for the first time I will run GetComponent.
/// Access otherScript.
/// This will find otherScript if it hasn't been found yet.
private OtherScript otherScript {
get {
if (m_otherScript == null) {
m_otherScript = GetComponent<OtherScript>() as OtherScript;
}
return m_otherScript;
}
}
private OtherScript m_otherScript;
what i do in such scenarios (generally), is that i use Awake() to pass all the needed gameobjects/information to other scripts…
then i use Start() to start using this newly passed data/info …
Some people say that the lazy initialization method (illustrated by Garth above) is suboptimal because, if a lot of those happen to come up in the middle of gameplay, it could cause a glitch in your framerate. So you sometimes see the recommendation to initialize such stuff in Start instead.
However, in practice, I suspect that it rarely makes any noticeable difference, and there are advantages to lazy initialization. So, I often do it in exactly the same way as Garth.
Wow! Thank you very much guys!
Yeah, it seems that “lazy initialization” is the way to go, that will surely eat up some extra CPU cycles though, but as JoeStrout said, I think it’s nothing significant.
I think it’s even okay to call GetComponent at every Update() though because it’s in the official examples: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/GameObject.GetComponent.html but that doesn’t seem very good practice nevetheless.
Yeah, I wouldn’t call GetComponent on every Update() unless it was some weird situation where the components on the object might be changing. Under normal circumstances, it’s easy enough to cache it in a property and reuse it on every frame.
