Wsrtjtyk

I want to access the animator component of my player character. The character is spawned under the GameObject Character position, which it self is the child of Game Manager.

The character prefabs have various names, so I cannot find them through exact name. So its easier to just get the only child of Character position.

Game Manager

  Character position

    Player Prefab

Ive searched online and tried GetChild by index and GetComponentInChildren. None of them work. Below is the script I wrote for this:

    private Animator archerAnimator;

    private float startSpeed;



    GameObject charPos;

    GameObject archer_;

    // Use this for initialization

    void Start () {

        charPos = GameObject.Find("Game manager/Character position");

        Debug.Log(charPos);

        archer_ = charPos.transform.GetChild(0).gameObject;

        archerAnimator = charPos.GetComponentInChildren<Animator>();

        Debug.Log(archerAnimator);

    }

charPos is found, but for archer_ I get the error, Transform child out of bounds. The player archer is not there but is spawned at run time when the scene starts, is this the reason it cannot find it so quickly?

Some guidance would be appreciated.

Thank you

I think you're scanning for the player too early. You should reverse your discovery logic. Instead of scanning for the player and its Animator, you should put a script on the player itself that runs after it is created and reports itself to the game manager or whatever object needs access to it, something like this:

void Start() { GetComponentInParent<GameManager>().OnPlayerSpawned(this); }

I'll also mention that some script finding an object by name and accessing its components is a generally bad idea. Here's a design guideline to always keep in mind: You should traverse Unity's object hierarchy as infrequently as possible, and even if you do, you should only traverse objects that don't have other scripts attached. In this case, you should also put the logic to control the Animator inside your Player script. Then, you wouldn't need to get a reference to the Animator in the first place.