Physics.OverlapSphere doubt!

I'm having a hard time understanding and coding the Physics.overlapSphere command. My intention was to make my player emit a circular raycast around himself and detect if there are any colliders around him, like a sonar detects objects it hits. So I wrote the following code:

Code (CSharp):

1.     public Collider[] hitCollider;
2.     public float radius;
3.  
4.     void DetectSonar(Vector3 center, float radius)
5.     {
6.         Collider[] hitCollider = Physics.OverlapSphere(center, radius);
7.         Debug.Log("It hit something");
8.     }
9.  
10.     void Update()
11.     {
12.         if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Y))
13.         {
14.             DetectSonar(transform.position, radius);
15.         }
16.     }
17. }

The Debug.Log counter increases regularly if I press the Y key, so that makes me think that the code is actually working. The big question is: am I being fooled by my inability to program and the code is actually not working?

 

So first off, your code calls OverlapSphere but never does anything with that information.

OverlapSphere is going to return an array of all colliders that were hit. Then your next line of code should do something with that array. You just call 'Debug.Log'. You should have something like:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. Collider[] hitColliders = Physics.OverlapSphere(center, radius);
3. if(hitColliders != null && hitColliders.Length > 0)
4. {
5.     //hit occurred, do something with that information
6.     Debug.Log("It hit something.");
7. }
8.  

Note, if you don't need to know what colliders were hit, you can also do 'CheckSphere':
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics.CheckSphere.html

Which returns true if something was found in the sphere. This can be more efficient if all you need to do is determine IF something was in the sphere, rather than WHAT was in the sphere.

Do note though... if you have a collider on your player. This might pick up those colliders too. You can avoid this by checking the 'hitColliders' for your own collider and ruling it out. Or passing in the layers to test for, and don't include the player's layer.

 

Thaaaaaaanks!!!!