Destroy instances after set time

Question

Heyo! So this is the set up thus far.

That video, in case you don't want to watch shows one player character dodging towers is he flies through them (or, in the case of the code, as the towers fly by the player).

What I'd like to happen is that the INSTANCES of the tower prefab is destroyed either A) when an appropriate amount of time has passed, or B) when they hit a specific set of coordinates, ie. -50 and -50 on the Z and X axis (or something).

Currently I have the towers being spawned from one tower prefab at random intervals. So I figured, instead of detecting when the towers are past the cameras range and destroying them at that point, I would wait a predetermined amount of time, let's say 10 seconds, and then destroy them. I can then decrease the time limit as the difficulty increases (faster towers).

I, however, am stuck on a good way to destroy the towers. This is not to say that I am unable, I have already set up a solution where a script, attached to the tower prefab itself, runs every 10 seconds destroying said towers. This, however, ended up being very messy, I had no control over determining how many towers had been destroyed.

So, what I have attempted to do is integrate the destroy functionality in to my tower creation script, which is attached to a null/empty object at the center of the scene. And herein lies my issue.

For the life of me I am unable to destroy said towers, with any method that I have found, utilizing Destroy. My current attempt, as you will see below was me simply waiting for 10 seconds and then invoking Destroy on the newTower variable.

I will be honest, I have no clue if that was even SUPPOSED to work, but I tried it anyways. There are other solutions I have attempted but all have yielded no results. For example, amoung many other attempts, I tried GameObject.Find("tower_prefab") within Destroy, but that too was a bust.

So ya, I am at a total loss. It should be noted, that I am, obviously, hugely new to programming/unity, so I could very well be doing something insanely stupid! lol

TowerCreate Script

#pragma strict

var newTower : Rigidbody; var towerSizeX = 1.0; var towerSizeY = 1.0; var towerSizeZ = 1.0; var towerLifeTime = 10.0; //seconds var towerSpawnTimeMin = 0.05; var towerSpawnTimeMax = 0.5;

private var towerDestroyCount = 0; private var towerCreationCount = 0;

function Start () { while(true) { yield new WaitForSeconds(Random.Range(towerSpawnTimeMin,towerSpawnTimeMax)); var towerNum = 1;

     for (var i = 0; i &lt; towerNum; i++)
     {
         var towerSpawnPosition = Instantiate
             (newTower,  
                 Vector3
                 (
                     Random.Range(-100,100),
                     Random.Range(0,0),
                     Random.Range(190,200)
                 ), 
                 Quaternion.identity
             );
         
         newTower.transform.localScale = new Vector3(towerSizeX, towerSizeY, towerSizeZ);            
         
         Debug.Log(&quot;Tower created&quot;);
         towerCreationCount++;
     }
 }
 
     while(true)
 {
     yield new WaitForSeconds(towerLifeTime);        
     
     newTower.Destroy(gameObject);
     
     Debug.Log(&quot;Tower destroyed&quot;);
     towerDestroyCount++;
 }

}

Answer 1

You would benefit in reusing the objects instead of destroying and instantiating, that way it would also be optimized for mobile devices too. I cooked up a script which handles this:

 #pragma strict
 
 /* Spawn & Reuse Objects
     Updated: 2012-07-18
 */
 
 enum PLAYERAXIS {
     x,y,z
 }
 
 var objectPrefab : GameObject; //The object you wish to spawn
 var playerTransform : Transform; //Player's transform (we use this to set position of the spawn area)
 var totalSpawnObjects : int = 20; //The amount of objects that is allowed in the scene
 var spawnPause : float = .5; //The pause between spawns
 var spawnAreaPosition : Vector3 = new Vector3(0,0,0); //The position of the spawn area
 var spawnAreaSize : Vector3 = new Vector3(100,1,0); //The size of the spawn area (we then randomly spawn inside this area in X, Y and Z)
 var followPlayerOnAxisDistance : PLAYERAXIS = PLAYERAXIS.z; //The axis the spawn area follow the player in distance
 var distanceFromPlayer : float = 20.0; //The distance of the spawn are to the player
  
 private var spawnTimeScheduler : float = .0;
 private var spawnPointer : int = 0;
 
 // Static variables for cached components of the objects below (we use this to access the spawned objects outside the script easily)
 static var objects : GameObject[];
 static var objectsTransform : Transform[];
 static var objectsRenderer : Renderer[];
 
 function Start () {
     objects = new GameObject[totalSpawnObjects];
     objectsTransform = new Transform[totalSpawnObjects];
     objectsRenderer = new Renderer[totalSpawnObjects];
     if (playerTransform==null) playerTransform = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag("Player").transform;
 }
 
 function Update () {
     if (Time.time>=spawnTimeScheduler) Spawn();
 }

 function Spawn () {
     //Position the spawn area
     spawnAreaPosition = playerTransform.position;
     switch (followPlayerOnAxisDistance) {
         case PLAYERAXIS.x: spawnAreaPosition.x+=distanceFromPlayer; break;
         case PLAYERAXIS.y: spawnAreaPosition.y+=distanceFromPlayer; break;
         case PLAYERAXIS.z: spawnAreaPosition.z+=distanceFromPlayer; break;
     }
 
     //Bake the spawn position into a variable
     var spawnPosition : Vector3 = Vector3(
         spawnAreaPosition.x-Random.Range(-spawnAreaSize.x/2, spawnAreaSize.x/2),
         spawnAreaPosition.y-Random.Range(-spawnAreaSize.y/2, spawnAreaSize.y/2),
         spawnAreaPosition.z-Random.Range(-spawnAreaSize.z/2, spawnAreaSize.z/2)
     );
 
     //Spawn new object
     if (objects[spawnPointer]!=null) {
         //Reuse the object
         objectsTransform[spawnPointer].position = spawnPosition;
     } else {
         //Instantiate the object
         var thisObject : GameObject = Instantiate(objectPrefab, spawnPosition, Quaternion.identity);
         CurrentSpawnedComponentCache(spawnPointer, thisObject.gameObject, thisObject.transform, thisObject.renderer);
     }
     if (spawnPointer++>=totalSpawnObjects-1) spawnPointer = 0;
     spawnTimeScheduler = Time.time+spawnPause;
 }
 
 //Cache the components of spawned objects
 function CurrentSpawnedComponentCache (i : int, g : GameObject, t : Transform, r : Renderer) {
     objects[i] = g;
     objectsTransform[i] = t;
     objectsRenderer[i] = r;
 }
 
 //Draw the spawn area in Scene view
 function OnDrawGizmos () {
     Gizmos.color = Color.yellow;
     Gizmos.DrawWireCube (spawnAreaPosition, spawnAreaSize);
 }

Here's an example scene as UnityPackage. Feel free to ask if there's something in the script that seems unclear.

Destroy instances after set time

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