koobas.hobune.stream
Cannot alter MonoBehaviour state variables
Unity 4.6. I have a controller script which is spawning hazards. It does this through GameObject.Instantiate, whose return value is being stored and then manipulated, like so.
GameObject thingy = (GameObject)Instantiate (hazard, spawnPosition, spawnRotation);
I then manipulate the objects attached to this GameObject through the GameObject.GetComponent().
These manipulations are successful for Unity standard object types, such as TextMeshes
thingy.GetComponent<TextMesh>().text = currentWord;
However, when I attempt to alter the state of script objects that inherit from MonoBehaviour, this process fails, in a silent and inconsistent way. When I access the script object, by type, from thingy.GetComponent(), I am returned a mutable object. I can perform the following:
thingy.GetComponent<HazardMover>().dxn = "down"; Debug.Log (thingy.GetComponent<HazardMover>().dxn); //returns "down"
However, this does not alter the dxn property of the instance of HazardMover attached to the instantiated object that shows up in the Inspector, and in the game.
There is, apparently, a level of indirection between what is returned by GetComponent and what is actually 'in the game'. I don't understand it, and I need to permute the HazardMover. I can permute the HazardMover if I access it by tag name, but this is a problem because to do this I have to iterate through all hazard GameObjects, which is not good. What's going on?
The answer to this was a lot simpler than I expected, and orthogonal to my train of thought. I had set dxn to "up" in the prefab start() method (along with setting it in the editor - a messy and bad idea), and that method was running after the instantiation code in the controller.
oops.
I'm not sure you're using the GetComponent function correctly.
YourScript script = gameObject.GetComponent<YourScript> ();
script.yourVariable = newValue;
I am actually, the problem is that unityanswers is sanitising anything i put in angle brackets. i tried your method of invocation - setting the thing to an explicit variable, didn't change anything.
