improving random item spawning

[ancient lake]

so as of now, the script i have made gets a table of spawnpoint parts, gets a table of items it could spawn and then spawns them at the cframes of every existing spawnpoint, so far so good
what im wondering is, how would i go about spawning a random item when an item is taken away from a spawnpoint or destroyed (restocking the spawnpoint)?
i do not wish to have anyone code the entire thing for me, i just want to be guided in the right direction or be given code snippets or links that could be helpful
would i have to do something with touch events?

[versed wagon]

have your table of spawn locations track what item is at the location or each item track what spawn location it is at then you now know which spawn location had its item picked up so you can then know to respawn a new item there

ez

[ancient lake]

uuuuuhh

[ancient lake]

could you explain how to make the spawn locations track the items with a bit more detail

[versed wagon]

table

[ancient lake]

not exactly "more detail" but okay ill see what i can do

[versed wagon]

tables very versatile. practice them

[ancient lake]

could i do something like parenting the spawned items to the spawnpoints themselves and then having a script in the spawnpoints that waits for an ancestry changed event, then when it detects that theres no item anymore it gets the random item table and spawns a random item again after like 10 minutes

[versed wagon]

probably

[ancient lake]

would also need to add a failsafe if the player somehow managed to throw the item into irretrievable oblivion without destroying it

not quite sure how to approach this

[versed wagon]

death plane destroys parts at -500

but if its in the world and out of reach then yea haha it gone

idk, you sound like you got this

[ancient lake]

maybe

[versed wagon]

have at it and just try different stuff

[ancient lake]

what can i do with position.magnitude

[versed wagon]

lol

yea keep practicing. no one fully understands what they're doing when trying something for a first time

you just have to http://tryitands.ee

[ancient lake]

i track the child of the spawnlocation

when its position changes i check for position magnitude relative to spawnlocation

if its too high

i put child into foster parent

spawnlocation cry and make another child after enough time

would this be inefficient or ugly

[versed wagon]

efficiency and how it looks should be the dead last thing you should be concerned about right now when you don't even have a solid idea of how to make it work at all in the first place.

[ancient lake]

im asking theoretically

[versed wagon]

priorities bruh. get it working first, and then maybe consider if your solution is trash, as opposed to considering if your proposed solution which doesn't exist yet is efficient and flawless and then putting pen to paper and trying to get it working.

it's probably the biggest mistake a beginner can make.

[ancient lake]

im having the fun

[versed wagon]

as a beginner you're going to write trash code, you can't avoid it. embrace the jank spaghetti code, keep calm, and make games 👍

[versed wagon]

that's the spirit! ⭐ dont worry about perfection. just make stuff that works.

[ancient lake]

my foolish ass accidentally forgot to set the proper position of a raycast that detects the highest point my ghoulish abominations could spawn at so they started spawning in my basement and mauling me

but i fixed it already so

how amusing

[versed wagon]

there will be many such oversights in everything you create. you don't know enough to reach peak perfection and efficiency, so don't bother. make, playtest, iterate, do this enough and you'll eventually have seen so many problems that you know what to look for most of the time, but even when you hit my stage you can still be surprised by dumb things

[ancient lake]

hmm

[versed wagon]

like the fact that rbxscriptconnection's don't inherit from the Object class (which should give it an :IsA() function)

that's just stupid on roblox's part, the docs lie 😮‍💨

[ancient lake]

there are many systems in my game that track if its day or night

do i make it into a module script somehow

[versed wagon]

docs say every class should inherit from object, yet clearly that's not true, example right there. in what world of perfect efficiency would you have known the docs were wrong? you see, you cannot account for everything.

idk modulescript, lighting.timeofday just play with stuff.

there's always more than 1 way to skin a cat.

[ancient lake]

i should add cat eating into my game

[versed wagon]

and in programming, infinite ways to do pretty much anything.

[ancient lake]

players can already eat my not human humanoid monsters

okay ill see what i can do with what i just conspired

oh what the fuck

oops

[violet elk]

o i know you

did you figure out the windmill

[ancient lake]

yers

very clean very awesome

[violet elk]

nice

[ancient lake]

i have figured out many things since then

but back to the matter

[ancient lake]

i attempted disemboweling my original spawning code

@versed wagon sir i am blind why did it spawn ten thousand of my items

did my descendant removing function run that many times

save me print

ah

its because of the children of the item

ill just make it detect one of the parts inside

apologies for the ping

i did it

[fair pond]

You could maybe parent the items to the spawn parts and check when a child is removed from the parts, and if it’s one of the items you spawned then restock it. If the items are tools picked up by the player or are items that are destroyed then this should work

[ancient lake]

conspiring with childadded and childremoved

[fair pond]

My phone is lagging and I just typed that out just for everything to load once it sent

[ancient lake]

mmm

[ancient lake]

i really dont wanna use any while loops to check the position of items

how do i make the getpropertychangedsignal function wait until the handle is defined
how should i do this differently

@versed wagon return for one last time smart fella i am foolish

[quick bane]

** You are now Level 7! **

[warm thorn]

He is forever gone, as he knows you no longer truly need him

[ancient lake]

how much will the funeral cost

😢

[fair pond]

Write local handle = nil

Somewhere above and then change it in the script

[ancient lake]

i did try that already

hold

[fair pond]

Do you know what I mean?

[ancient lake]

yer

[fair pond]

So why didn’t it work

Can you send a pic of what u did

[ancient lake]

ill have to try again

since i discombobulated the code

hold

@fair pond

[fair pond]

Try adding the getpropertychangedsignal in the child added thing

So one big function instead of 2

[ancient lake]

i did try that

but ill try it again

[ancient lake]

no reaction

[fair pond]

Can you send script

And error

[ancient lake]

-- Services --
local ServerStorage = game:GetService("ServerStorage")

-- Script --
local itemsFolder = ServerStorage.Items.RandomSpawn

local itemSpawn = script.Parent
local items = itemsFolder:GetChildren()
local item = nil
local handle = nil

local itemRespawnTime = itemSpawn:GetAttribute("ItemRespawnTime")
local debounce = false

local function spawnObject()
local clone = items[math.random(1, #items)]:Clone()
clone:SetPrimaryPartCFrame(itemSpawn.CFrame * CFrame.new(0, 0.5, 0) * CFrame.Angles(0, 0, 90))
clone.Parent = itemSpawn
end

itemSpawn.ChildAdded:Connect(function(part)
print("baba")
item = part
handle = part:FindFirstChild("Handle")

handle:GetPropertyChangedSignal("Position"):Connect(function()
    print((itemSpawn.Position - handle.Position).Magnitude)
    if (itemSpawn.Position - handle.Position).Magnitude > 10 then
        handle.Parent.Parent = workspace.ReplicatedItems
    end
end)

end)

itemSpawn.ChildRemoved:Connect(function()
task.wait(itemRespawnTime)
spawnObject()
end)

there are no errors

i think that function might only be active for that one singular moment that the childadded function is active

[fair pond]

Try adding a wait() or a wait(0.2) after you define the handle, it might not be fully loaded