Question SetSiblingIndex causing unwanted shuffling of child objects in hierarchy

I am writing code for my weapon system, which allows the player to equip 4 weapons at one time (which are each child objects of a WeaponHolder object), the player is able to drop the weapons and the slot becomes empty. The issue I am running into is when the player drops weapon in child index 2, and then the weapon in child index 3, it causes unwanted shuffling of other child objects.

The way my code works is when the player removes a weapon, it destroys the weapon and instantiates an empty object, which gets its sibling index set to the same index the weapon had before it was destroyed. This systems works for the most part (ie. if index 0 is dropped, and then index 1, it functions correctly).

Code (CSharp):

1. emptyObj.transform.SetParent(wepHolder.transform);
2. emptyObj.transform.SetSiblingIndex(wepslotInt);

Image 1: After dropping the weapon in slot 2 at runtime.
Image 2: After dropping the weapon in slot 3 at runtime. It should look like RailGun in slot 0, and 1, followed by the 2 empty slots named Slot2 and Slot3.

Thank you so much for any help.

 

Why are you doing it like this anyway? In my opinion, GetChild() used in almost any context is a code smell. Why are you depending on arbitrary object hierarchy? Why don't you manage the ordering of this through code?

 

I took your advice and just wrote some code to manage my weapon slots through code and it definitely was the route, don't have to deal with the hassle of using sibling indexes.