Prefab Camera - Variables Not Updating

Question

I'm having issues with doing a camera shake and why this is not working is escaping me. There is a public method here called triggerShake that when an enemy dies this code is called - it sets a shake timer which should shake and deincrement. All of this works when dealing with scene objects, but when the camera/enemies are all instantiated prefabs - it doesn't work. It seems really strange, I can see all the code runs without error. The public method gets triggered when it's supposed to and I see in the debug.log the variable is set but the next update it's set back to 0. What else is strange is that if I set the initial shakeTime variable to something greater than zero, the camera does shake when I start it up. It's almost like it's treating the shakeTime variable in the public triggerShake method as a different variable entirely. In fact, I know that's what it's doing. If I set the code in triggerShake to += I see that variable increase each time it's triggered.

Not sure why the shakeTime initialized at the top is different than the shakeTime in triggerShake...

 using System.Collections;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using UnityEngine;
 
 public class screenShake : MonoBehaviour
 {
     private Transform tf;
 
     private float shakeTime = 0.0f;
     private float shakeMag = 0.05f;
     private float dampingRate = 3.0f;
     private Vector3 initialPosition;
 
     // Update is called once per frame
     void Update()
     {
         if (shakeTime > 0)
         {
             Debug.Log(shakeTime);
             tf.localPosition = initialPosition + Random.insideUnitSphere * shakeMag;
             shakeTime -= Time.deltaTime * dampingRate;
         }
         else
         {
             shakeTime = 0.0f;
             tf.localPosition = initialPosition;
         }
     }
 
     void Awake()
     {
         tf = GetComponent(typeof(Transform)) as Transform;
         initialPosition = tf.localPosition;
 
     }
 
     public void triggerShake()
     {
         shakeTime = 5.5f;
 
         Debug.Log(shakeTime);
     }
 
 
 }

Answer 1

Answer by bkeegan · Aug 03, 2019 at 09:32 PM

I was able to come up with a workable solution - although still not sure why I had to it this way. Since everything was working as items in the hierarchy and not as prefabs. I thought that maybe if a camera is instantiated from a prefab it behaves differently. Instead of calling the code from a reference prefab. I left the camera itself as a hierarchy item and just found that item by tag and called the triggerShake function that way

     cams = GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("MainCamera");
     foreach (GameObject cam in cams)
     { 
         cam.gameObject.GetComponent<screenShake>().triggerShake();
     }

This works as intended, but again, still not sure why the variables wouldn't behave as intended when the camera was instantiated from a prefab.

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Prefab Camera - Variables Not Updating

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