Getting and switching prefabs

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Hello, I'm making a racing game with power ups... And because I'm fairly new to Unity, I'm finding a few problems when trying to make it uncoupled.

The design is more or less this

UML

I also have a Prefab for each powerup, but I don't know where I should save them and where I should instantiate them. For example, one of these power ups is a missile. However I don't know how I should show my missile's prefab in the scene. I kept reading one has to drag and drop the prefabs to use them but I don't want the car to know every single one of the power ups, but just the one he currently has. It would also be great to not have to call the prefab's path to instantiate it

Does anyone know how I could instantiate them?

EDIT: I marked Thaun_'s idea as the solution because it seemed like a good idea, but in the end what I did was make a ScriptableObject that holds all the powerups and assign it to the car's MonoBehaviour and it works like a charm

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Answer by Thaun_ · Sep 25, 2017 at 10:44 AM

Drag the GameObject to the hierarchy in a prefab folder or anywhere.

on the start of the script add public GameObject PreFab;

Drag the gameobject in the hierarchy where the prefab is stored to the script.

To instantiate an object do Instantiate(PreFab);

More info here: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Object.Instantiate.html

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Vingyard · Sep 25, 2017 at 11:58 AM 0

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The problem in that is that I don't know how to call that prefab. If I don't store every single power up in the car monobehavior by dragging and dropping it there like the guide shows (which I think I shouldn't because it's really messy code), how am I able to call that Prefab?

Thaun_ · Sep 25, 2017 at 12:02 PM 1

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You dont store the prefab in the car, you store the path of the prefab. When you instantiate, you copy the object.

Also, if you would like a list of prefabs, you could just do

 public List<GameObject> powerUps;
 public GameObject currentPowerUp;

 void ExampleSpawnPowerup(int powerInt){
     currentPowerUp = Instantiate(powerUps[powerInt]);
 }

if you want to call the script the gameobject has is to do:

 void ExampleActivate(){
     currentPowerUp.GetComponent<PowerUpScript>().Activate(this);
 }

Vingyard Thaun_ · Sep 25, 2017 at 12:10 PM 0

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Hm, that sort of makes me want to make an empty GameObject with a list of all the powerup prefabs and ask that GameObject to instantiate them. Is that considered "unity-like" or is it too ugly?

Thaun_ · Sep 25, 2017 at 12:18 PM 1

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Yes you could, you could just have 1 GameObject containing all the GameObjects for the powerup.

meaning the code will look like this:

 public GameObject powerUpListObj;
 public GameObject currentPowerup;

 void spawnPowerup(int powerInt){
     currentPowerup = Instantiate(powerUpListObj.transform.GetChild(powerInt));
  }
  void ExampleActivate(){
      currentPowerUp.GetComponent<PowerUpScript>().Activate(this);
 }

Vingyard Thaun_ · Sep 25, 2017 at 12:24 PM 0

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That's exactly what I'll do then. Thank you!

Getting and switching prefabs

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