Changing collider from polygon to circle (then back to polygon) in game?

Hello -

I am porting an Asteroids-like game from one engine to Unity.

When the player's ship gets destroyed, it is respawned at the center of the play field, but only if there are no rocks or UFOs within a certain range.

In the other engine I simply had an invisible object with collision detection handling the logic. If a rock was colliding with the object, the ship wouldn't respawn.

I wonder if in Unity I could just "swap colliders". The ship has a polygon collider during normal play. I wonder if I can center the ship upon collision, change the collider to a circle to detect any nearby rocks, and at the proper moment change back to a polygon collider.


Thanks, regards.

 

You do not need circle collider on your ship. You check if circular area is free of asteroids with call to Physics2D.OverlapCircle() (doc: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics2D.OverlapCircle.html). If you need list of all asteroids in that area, you can use Physics2D.OverlapCirclaAll() (doc: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics2D.OverlapCircleAll.html)

(There are also similar methods for capsules, boxes, etc.)

 

Thanks for your reply!