Question by elpedro_75 · Apr 13, 2014 at 09:22 PM · gameobject array children

Creating an array of immediate children of a game object

Hello,

Inside a game object, I am trying to make an array of other game objects which are its immediate children. It is easy to find how many immediate children the game object contains using transform.childcount, but the only methods that I can think of to store them as a collection (array) are very verbose.

To clarify the problem further, my GameObject is a MenuObject, which may contain submenu MenuObjects. I'm trying to find the submenu objects of any given MenuObject. I have tried numerous things, none of which were successful. At present, I have:

             // Populate an array of submenu objects
     
             submenuObjects = new MenuObject [transform.childCount];
     
             for (int i = 0; i < transform.childCount; i ++)
             {
                 Transform next = transform.GetChild (i); // this works
                 submenuObjects [i] = next.gameObject; // can't cast between MenuObject and gameObject
             }

In this scenario, I have a reference to the GameObject of a MenuObject, but I don't know how to place that in my array. Is there a simple way to create an array of immediate children in C#?

Thank you in advance,

Peter

Add comment · Show 5

joshpsawyer · Apr 13, 2014 at 10:42 PM 0

You could call this from the GameObject in question:

 Transform[] children = GetComponentsInChildren< Transform >();

Then you'd have an array of the childrens transforms, and you can grab the child GameObject in question with

 children[i].gameObject

Edit: Answer moved to comment. I didn't realize this was a recursive function, thanks @robertbu and @elpedro_75 for pointing that out.

elpedro_75 joshpsawyer · Apr 13, 2014 at 11:10 PM 0

Thank you for your response.

I tried using GetComponentsInChildren, but I found that it returned both the object in question and the grandchildren. Hence, if an object had two children, and one of those children had a child, it would return four values.

robertbu · Apr 13, 2014 at 11:27 PM 1

Assu$$anonymous$$g you are absolutely sure that all children have the '$$anonymous$$enuObject' script attached, the last line would be:

 submenuObjects [i] = next.GetComponent<$$anonymous$$enuObject>();

Note your question does not indicate the real problem. That is, you want to build an array of a specific components of immediate children.

While not as clean, you could use GetComponentsInChildren() as @joshpawyer indicated and just ignore any entries where the transform.parent is not the transform above the immediate children.

elpedro_75 · Apr 13, 2014 at 11:37 PM 0

Thank you, roberbu! That is exactly what I needed. I considered the second solution, but decided it was just getting too messy.

Yes, you are quite right; I should have stated my problem more clearly too.

Thank you, both, for your help.

joshpsawyer · Apr 14, 2014 at 12:43 AM 0

Whoops, I broke UA. I converted my answer to a comment, this question now has -1 answers