(Rambling) Unity Tutorial: Easy Object Pooling using a Stack
How to efficiently 'destroy' and re-spawn objects using a stack (more efficient than an array) for thousands of objects.
I show you how to iterate over (look through) the stack of objects using a foreach loop. We also explore how to fetch data/variables from other scripts, how to create prefabs, and how to reposition game objects when they are re-spawned inside a random unit sphere.
We also improve the accuracy of our laser (from the previous video: • Unity tutorial: script a laser with L... ) with the ScreenToRay Camera function (see previous video for how to create this functional laser effect).
See below for a few suggestions on improvements, and something I forgot to cover in the video.
Thanks for watching!
Notes:
1)
It would be more efficient to check for inactive objects for re-spawning ONLY each time we fire the laser -- instead of every single Update(); the logic being, only after the laser is fired is there a chance of the objects being set to inactive.
2) I forgot to look at re-spawning objects once they have moved far enough, or have reached a certain distance away from the player. So here's one line of code that will achieve that:
if (n.transform.position.z == -1000f) { n.activeSelf = false;}
This should be placed in the foreach loop, where we are moving the droplets negatively along the z axis. I've had to use == here instead of the safer and more logical idea of a backwards 'less than' arrow, only because you can't use the backward-arrow in the Youtube description :)
Another method would be to measure the distance between the player's position and the droplet's position:
if (Vector3.Distance(player.position, n.transform.position) [GREATER THAN ARROW] 300f) { n.activeSelf = false;}
Same issue with the forwards-arrow :). The Vector3.Distance function measures the distance between two Vector3 objects -- in this case our droplet's position and the player's position. If this is greater than a certain amount (I've just chosen 300f), then set the droplet to inactive.
Handy that as soon as inactive, our code already takes care of re-spawning them at the desired location.