A good work-around for indexing spawned actors

adamhwilk

Thought I'd share something pretty useful that I thought wasn't possible in game salad. I'm sure someone else has figured this out or something similar, but maybe it will help a frustrated somebody.

Say you have a game idea -- you want to create a tower defense game, and spawn all kinds of towers, and have them do cool things -- great. Problem is spawned actors can't compare values very swiftly, so you make half a dozen unlocked actors on a scene and dumb your design down a bit.

Maybe not -- try something a bit different.

In your "spawner" control, whatever actor creates units/towers/whatever for you, you need to add a row to a table that stores all the actor's attributes. The trick is to use the X or Y position as the index / pointer in your array. Your table will be indexed by this spawn position.

In your spawned actor, throw a boolean when created to set a self.actorID attribute to x position. After we have an ID assigned, use a rule to set any attributes that you want to toy with to that table you made.

It sounds kind of weird typing it out, but this kind of work around opens up a lot of game types for gs