This week, we worked to make the “Gem Found” prefab that we created last week actually appear when we found a gem, and disappear after it’s played it’s animation.

A Script for Our ‘Gem Found’ Prefab

We want a simple script, called GemFoundMessage.cs, that will set the message on the prefab’s canvas to match the gem we just found:

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using TMPro;

public class GemFoundMessage : MonoBehaviour
{
    public TMP_Text Text;
    public Transform GemHolder;

    public void SetGemDefinition(GemDefinition gd)
    {
        string message = string.Format("You found a {0} spirit gem!",
                                       gd.name);
        Text.text = message;
    }
}

We attach this to the root of of our prefab. This script contains a single function we can call to set the text based on the gem definition and a couple of properties. One property is the text we need to update, the other is the location where we’re going to spawn a gem model to have it animate.

Making the GemFound Prefab Clean Itself Up

We already have a SelfDestruct script. We add it to our GemFound Prefab and give it a time of 4 seconds; this is enough time for our animation to finish.

Updating PlayerDig

We now need to update PlayerDig.cs. There are a few things to do:

1. After spawning our digging animation, we want to wait three seconds and then check to see if we’ve found a gem.
2. We look to see if the nearest gem is within a certain distance (the larger we make this the less precise the player will need to be)
3. Assuming there is a gem there, find out what type of a gem it is
4. Add it to our inventory [We’ll need to wait to do this, as we don’t have our inventory written yet]
5. Create a GemFound prefab
   • Inform it what gem type we have
   • Create a gem as part of the GemFound

First we add the line Invoke(“DigResult”, 3); this to the OnDig() function as shown:

        :
        if (Physics.Raycast(rayPos, Vector3.down, out hitInfo, 10.0f, lm))
        {
            Instantiate(DiggingPrefab, hitInfo.point,
                        DiggingPrefab.transform.rotation);
            Invoke("DigResult", 3);
        }
        :

We then add the DigResult() function:

    private void DigResult()
    {
        float distToNearest = (ItemScatterer.nearestItem.transform.position -
                               transform.position).magnitude;

        if (distToNearest > MaxDistToItem)
            return;

        // Capture the gem definition
        RandomGem rg = ItemScatterer.nearestItem.GetComponent<RandomGem>();
        GemDefinition gd = rg.GemDefinition;

        // Remove the item from ItemScatterer
        Destroy(ItemScatterer.nearestItem);
        ItemScatterer.nearestItem = null;

        // TODO: Add to our inventory

        // Spawn the Gem Found Prefab to let the player know what they found
        GameObject gfb = Instantiate(GemFoundPrefab, GemFoundLocation);
        GemFoundMessage gfm = gfb.GetComponent<GemFoundMessage>();
        GameObject gem = Instantiate(gd.Prefab, gfm.GemHolder);
        gfm.SetGemDefinition(gd);
    }

This does everything we talked about above.

Basic UI

We took a short look at simple UI layout options as preparation for building the UI next session.

Code Download

The code for this week’s project is on our GitHub, as always.