TOE week 9 and 10: Showing Off and Doing It Wrong.

                I was on vacation again this week so I didn’t really do a lot. Aside from show off the game to various different people who I could subject it to. I did however get a working primary attack set up. Last week I set up some targets that would take damage when hit but any of my secondary weapons. This week I set it up so the targets will die after they run out of hit points. The targets are supposed to give the player ammo when they die but I didn’t have a set up for player ammo being deduced when a secondary weapon was used. I added a player ammo counter and a restriction that prevents the player from using a secondary weapon if they don’t have any ammo. Once that was set up it was pretty easy to add into the on death for the target to give the player ammo when the target is destroyed. 

                Next week I need to add in a basic UI for Player; health, current secondary weapon, ammo and can teleport. I also wanted to make a video of what I currently have. But I think that may have to wait until next week. It hasn’t really been a big week but I did get more done than the last time I was on vacation. 

                Hey look it is next week. I didn’t post this last week partly because I was on vacation and partly because I didn’t have a lot to report. I kind of still don’t BUT I did add in all of the UI elements for Player stuffs. I did find some small bugs with my can teleport bool. Basically if my top raycast is not touching collision but the bottom raycast is touching collision the can teleport bool is true BUT the player can’t teleport. Super minor. It is certainly something that needs to be fixed but for the most part it works. The issue is clearly not with the UI and more with the teleport testing method I’m using. I need to change this test to an onOverlap instead off of four rayCastHit.

                So I’m going to complain about getComponent call once again SHOCKING I know. To make my UI work I have four Canvas elements that each monitors four player variables. I have seen on the internets in my research on this topic that you should never use a getComponent call every frame it will slow your game down. This was the only way I could figure out how to get the UI to update when the player variables changed. However there was no slow down when all of them were updating. Basically my update for UI stuff looked like this: 

Update(){

GameObject thePlayer = GameObject.Find("Player");
Player playerScript = thePlayer.GetComponent<Player>();


displayPlayerAmmo.text = playerScript.playerAmmoCount.ToString();

}

                Again I have been told that this is terrible but various Unity people on different Unity forums. But how am I supposed to display and monitor variables from the player in the UI canvas? No seriously how does one do this?  I had a thought and it was this: 

Update(){

If (hasGotten == false){

GameObject thePlayer = GameObject.Find("Player");
Player playerScript = thePlayer.GetComponent<Player>();

hasGotten = true;

}


displayPlayerAmmo.text = playerScript.playerAmmoCount.ToString();

}

                However THAT doesn’t work because GetComponent call only seems to pertain to the method you are currently in. Meaning that Update doesn’t know about playerScript. Only the nested If statement knows about the playerScript. 

                The wife goes back to work next week and I will have less time to devote to this thing. So my Updates might be shorter. I think I need to switch to working on more of the artwork as that is something I can do at the same time as being a stay at home parent much easier than programming.