Ways to reference an object ? Which way is fastest/most efficient ?

Hello my friends,

I decided to rewrite my code to avoid using FindObjectOfType as I thought it might be easier on the PC if I just link the other object in the inspector given that it is only one and exists at the beginning of the scene. Basically I have two objects Timer and Text object displaying the time. This is the code I came up with but I find that I had to reference the serialized text object but then I needed a second variable to hold the text component. Can you write this in a more efficient way please as I find I do a lot of this type of referencing at the moment ?

Code (CSharp):

1. public class Timer : MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.     [SerializeField] Text timerTextObject;
4.     Text timerText = default;
5.     float timeForLevel;
6.     public static bool IsTimerElapsed;
7.  
8.     private void Start()
9.     {
10.         IsTimerElapsed = false;
11.         timerText = timerTextObject.GetComponent<Text>();
12.         timeForLevel = levelManager.TimeForLevel;
13.     }
14.  
15.     void Update()
16.     {
17.         timeForLevel -= Time.deltaTime;
18.         timerText.text = Mathf.Round(timeForLevel).ToString();
19.         if (timeForLevel <= 0)
20.         {
21.             timeForLevel = 0;
22.             IsTimerElapsed = true;
23.             levelManager.TimeElapsed();
24.         }
25.     }
26. }

 

I'm confused as to the purpose of timerTextObject and timerText. They are both variables of type Text and you're simply setting one equal to another. And why are you doing GetComponent on Text object?

You can either make timerTextObject public or leave it as is (SerializeField makes a private variable visible in the inspector) and it will show up in the inspector. Drag and drop the gameObject with the Text component into the variable slot and just replace timerText.text with timerTextObject. You don't even need timerText.

 

So instead of having one field for the GameObject, and then one field for the component, and then calling GetComponent on the GameObject, you can just do this:

Code (CSharp):

1.     [SerializeField] Text timerText;

There is no need to call GetComponent, you already have a reference to the Component. Just drag your the object with the Text component into the inspector and you're good to go.

 

Thanks both for the answer. I see what you mean and have fixed the problem.

Just as a general rule, will this be the most efficient way of referencing another object (as opposed to FindObjectOfType()) ?

 

Yes - this is pretty much the most efficient way possible in Unity. It's a direct reference baked into the scene/prefab.

FindObjectOfType is not even a similar concept. It searches every single object in the scene until it finds an object of a particular type, and just grabs the first one it finds. This is extremely slow, and there is no way of disambiguating if you have more than one object of the same type.

 

That's great Praetor - this is useful.