transform.forward not updating?

Questions & Answers
1

OK, this is patently weird (to me, anyway)

So I’ve been trying to get the degree on a single local axis between two points for a while now, and that, in and of itself works fine.
However, I also need to compare this angle to another angle, and now I’ve noticed something odd:
As far as I understood, the transform.forward parameter should always hold the global direction the object is facing, however, for me it only seems to update if I manually assign the forward Vector in a script (It also correctly displays the changed, new rotation in the editor and game view). If I simply change the rotation either from within a script or by using the direct editor controls, the forward Vector’s value doesn’t update.
This is true both for main GOs as well as their individual children.

I thought that transform.forward was effectively identical with transform.TransformDirection(Vector.forward) (Which doesn’t do anything for me either), is this incorrect?

BTW, I’m using the most current version of Unity (Non-Pro)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

2

I have never had any problems with transform.forward. Not to say that you haven’t discovered a bug, but I’m skeptical. How are you checking the value of transform.forward? There are lots of ways that you can test the values of it, the easiest would just be to

 Debug.Log(transform.forward);

in an Update() and see what you get.

3

I think I had the exact same issue. It started after I crashed the editor.

Toggling enable on the affected script in the editor during run-time would make transform.forward report the correct value again.

I solved my problem by copying the whole script (Ctrl-A so I didn’t miss anything) into a new file with a different name.

Conjecture Warning → Does Unity have meta-data of script files? That might explain it.

(I know I’m 5 years late, this is for any future forum miners and time travellers that have this issue)

4

This is still a bug in 2023.1.8f1; as said before, toggling enable on the affected script in the editor during run-time would update transform.forward, but only on that frame. The bug also prevents transform.TransformDirection() from working properly.

I fixed it by deleting the project and cloning it again (equivalent to deleting everything but the Assets, Packages and ProjectSettings folders, and then re-importing the game). Deleting everything but these folders won’t break anything, if anyone is worried. You don’t have to mess with copying scripts into different files; that will break prefabs.