How does gameobject.find work?

Question

Hello, all. I'm fairly new to coding, and Unity in general, and I need a little help.

I'm trying to set up an instanced jump pad prefab that I can plop down into my levels anywhere, facing any direction, and not have to edit them. I'd like for them to function similar to those of 3D sonic games, where when you hit them it always launches you in the pad's forward direction.

The way I was going to set them up is by having an empty game object child that sits just in front of the pad, facing the pad's forward direction. On collision, I was going to have the jump pad's script check what object has collided with it, then check if it has a rigid body component. If it does, I'd like it to set that object's position and rotation equal to the empty pad direction object, then apply force to the colliding object's forward direction.

The problem is that gameobject.find() seems to search the ENTIRE SCENE hierarchy, starting from the top of the list as seen in the editor and working it's way down each object and it's children in top to bottom order. I need to figure out how to get the function to only search within the object running the script, and it's own children, for this padDirectionObject, skipping over anything that's not inside the instance running the script.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

Answer by HenriMR · Nov 18, 2019 at 09:26 PM

Yes, Find() searches through all game objects. The way I would do to restrict the seach to the game objects with a script is to put a static list of the type of the script and on the Awake() or Start() add the script to the list. Then you can search only on this list.

     private List<MyScript> list;
     
     private Awake()
     {
           list.Add(this);
     }
 
    void Search()
   {
        foreach(MyScript script in list)
      {
           script.gameObject.transform.Find("name of child");
      }
 
   }

Hope its helpfull.

Links:

1- https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/GameObject.Find.html

2- https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Transform.Find.html

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HenriMR · Nov 18, 2019 at 09:29 PM 0

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Forgot one thing:

 void OnDestroy
 {
    list.Remove(this);
 }

It´s important, or it can cause errors if the gameObject is destroyed and not removed.

How does gameobject.find work?

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