Essentially, I want to set the camera's Y position to another GameObject's Y position, but I only want to do this one. If you do
cam.transform.position = new Vector3(0, thing.transform.position.y, 0),
it will continuously update to that object's y. Even if I store the Y float in a variable and set the camera's y to that it still continuously updates. It is only supposed to happen once.
You can set the camera's Y position once by setting it in one of the built-in functions that's executed only once. In Unity there's two such functions and they're called Start and Awake.
Some information about the two functions:
Start function gets called on the frame when a script is enabled, just before any Update function is called the first time.Start function is called only once during the lifetime of the script instance.Awake function gets called when a script instance is being loaded.Start function, the Awake function is also only called once during the lifetime of the script instance.Awake function is always called before any Start functions.Based on the above information, we can make sure that the other object, let's call it the target object, is fully initialized and correctly positioned before the position information is retrieved from it and the camera's position is set.
I'm not very familiar with Unity so the code example below is pseudo code and needs to be adapted/edited to work in Unity.
// Script attached to the camera object public class CameraPositionScript : MonoBehaviour { // The target object which the camera object should retrieve the position from private GameObject target; void Awake() { // The target object has been initialised at this point, so it's safe to reference it here target = GameObject.FindWithTag("TargetName"); } void Start() { // Set the camera's Y position to the target object's Y position, this is done only once gameObject.transform.position.y = target.transform.position.y; } } If you have the cam target a Transform then you can use that so it just moves to whatever is in the selectedTarget field.
That way thing1 and thing2 ect could swap back and forth or whatever else you were selecting and all you would have to do is assign the transformTarget to a new transform.
To run only once in the update you can add a condition to check then you could do something like this.
public Transform selectedTarget; string cachedTargetsName="";//set to cache the selections name void Update() { if(selectedTarget.gameObject.name != cachedTargetsName) MoveOnceToTargetsY(); } void MoveOnceToTargetsY() { cam.transform.position = new Vector3(0, selectedTarget.position.y, 0); cachedTargetName = selectedTarget.gameObject.name; } you can likely add a condition similar to if(selectedTarget.gameObject.name != cachedTargetsName)MoveOnceToTarget() various other ways to accomplish also like a OnChanged Event or something along those lines but this should get you on the right path.
If you want to this in the mid of your game, You can use "Flags". Syntax will be like below :
bool flag; //It is False by default fun() { if (!flag) { flag = true; //set your flag //Your one time executable code } } If you want to do it again, simply reset your "flag".
void Update() { if (parameterIsMet) { cam.transform.position = new Vector3(0, thing.transform.position.y, 0); } }
