Finding objects in range

Over the course of a game we often need to know what objects are around a particular point in space. Some examples are to determine the number of bad guys immediately around the player, to find the number of zombies near a grenade explosion, or to discover the number of skeletons to throw back from a Gust of Wind spell. In this recipe, we will learn how to perform a radial search of Torque 3D's scene graph for objects of interest.

How to do it...

The following code snippet performs a search for all the ShapeBase objects within five meters of a given position in the world:

echo("Starting search...");

%worldPos = "0 0 241";
initContainerRadiusSearch(%worldPos, 5,
                          $TypeMasks::ShapeBaseObjectType);
%obj = containerSearchNext();
while(%obj != 0)
{
   echo("Found object: " @ %obj.getId());

   %obj = containerSearchNext();
}

echo("Finished search.");

The console output will look similar to the following screenshot:

How it works...

The initContainerRadiusSearch...