IMPORTANT UPDATE

This arti­cle is part of an old­er video series, I recent­ly upload a Uni­ty pro­to­type to help under­stand­ing how the OnTrig­ger sys­tem works, how to con­fig­ure the objects from the scene and how the func­tions are called. Please check the oth­er arti­cle to see the updat­ed infor­ma­tion and down­load the Uni­ty Package.

GO TO THE NEW ARTICLE

HERE CONTINUES THE OLD ARTICLE

Introduction

In this arti­cle we are going to study how to use the OnTrig­ger­Enter (Col­lid­er c) and OnTrig­gerEx­it (Col­lid­er c) meth­ods to detect the play­er in a giv­en region and apply actions when that hap­pens. Specif­i­cal­ly we are going to make the GameDe­vLab door open when the play­er is in front of it and close when it moves away.

Go to the project’s main page

Procedure

We are going to use the "OnTriggerEnter/Exit" sta­tion, which con­sists of a por­tal that leads to a small room that for now has noth­ing special. 

Ini­tial­ly the door is closed, our goal is to detect the char­ac­ter when he approach­es and open the door to let him in and away from the por­tal the door must close.

All ele­ments of the sta­tion are con­tained in the GameOb­ject "#6 OnTriggerEnter/Exit".

This GameOb­ject is assigned the script "OnTrig­ger­EnterEx­it" which is the one we have to com­plete on this occasion.

In addi­tion to a Mesh Col­lid­er so that the char­ac­ter does not cross the struc­ture, it also has a Box Col­lid­er in Trig­ger mode, as seen in fig­ures 3 and 4.

Let's use this Col­lid­er to solve the exercise.

If you want to know more about Col­lid­ers I invite you to watch this video I made for the series "My First Game in Uni­ty".

Resolution

When we open the OnTrig­ger­EnterEx­it Script for the first time we find two meth­ods, the open­Door() method that will open the door and the close­Door() method that will close it.

Arti­cle: What is a method in programming?

In addi­tion, the region where the rede­f­i­n­i­tion of the OnTriggerEnter(Collider c) and OnTriggerExit(Collider c) meth­ods is sug­gest­ed is indi­cat­ed with green comments.

We're not going to wor­ry about how the door opens and clos­es because that's already solved in GameDevLab.

How the OnTriggerEnter(Collider c) and OnTriggerExit(Collider c) methods work

In the pre­vi­ous arti­cle we saw how the OnTrig­ger­Stay method worked and we used it to make the dam­age and regen­er­a­tion sta­tions affect the player's health.

Arti­cle: OnTrig­ger­Stay Method

For the OnTrig­ger­Enter and OnTrig­gerEx­it meth­ods the same require­ments are need­ed, what changes is the moment they are executed.

OnTrig­ger­Enter runs the moment the play­er enters the trig­ger for the first time, i.e. the pre­vi­ous frame of the game was out­side the trig­ger and the cur­rent frame is inside.

On the oth­er hand, the OnTrig­gerEx­it method is exe­cut­ed at the moment in which the play­er leaves the trig­ger, that is to say in the pre­vi­ous frame of the game it was inside the trig­ger and in the cur­rent frame it is outside. 

With this in mind, what we can do is open the door in the OnTrig­ger­Enter method and close it in the OnTrig­gerEx­it method. 

In addi­tion we are going to ver­i­fy that the tag of the Col­lid­er that entered in the trig­ger is equal to "Play­er", of that form we know that it is about the play­er. The fol­low­ing fig­ure shows the resolution.

Conclusion

The OnTrig­ger­Enter and OnTrig­ger­Enter meth­ods allow us to detect GameOb­jects that enter a cer­tain region, this has a num­ber of appli­ca­tions, for exam­ple acti­vate kine­mat­ics, mech­a­nisms, allow us to per­form cer­tain actions only when we are in a cer­tain region, and so on.

Unlike the OnTrig­ger­Stay method, these meth­ods are run only once when one of the above sit­u­a­tions occurs.