How do I get a reference to a component on a sibling object in C# Script?

Question

I'm working on a game, where the player dumps trash from Trash cans into a Trash Truck. These Trash cans have a random chance of having a Racoon on top of them.

I have a script set up to detect when the player enters a Collider Trigger attached to the Racoon, which will cause it to play an animation and start attacking the player.

To do that, it needs to work with a racoon navigation component on a neighbouring object:

I'm trying to access the RacoonNAVAI component on the Racoon_Mover game object with this line:

racNav = transform.parent.parent.Find("Racoon Mover").gameObject.GetComponent<RacoonNAVAI>();

But it's throwing a null reference exception. How can I correctly get a reference to this component?

Answer 1

In the line below you are looking for Racoon Mover instead of Racoon_Mover, note the _ (underscore symbol).

racNav = transform.parent.parent.Find("Racoon Mover").gameObject.GetComponent<RacoonNAVAI>();

Also, it is not a good idea to use find in runtime code like this. Instead, you can assign it as a serialized component if they are part of the same prefab or at least cache the reference so that you won't need to look it up each time. Good luck!