GameMaker place_meeting VS place_empty

[zendraw]

why wuld you use place meeting and not place empty? they seem to be pretty much the same thing. whats the diffrence?

 

[OwainHorton]

I use place empty for when for example i want to create an object and i want to check if an object already exists there.
I wouldn't recomend place empty for collisions because maybe theres for example an object called "Grass" and returns that the place isn't empty when you just want it to collide with object called "Rock".

 

[chamaeleon]

why wuld you use place meeting and not place empty?

Taking the question literally, you would use place_meeting() because you want to make sure a specific object instance is not present at the location while some other kind of object instance could be but you don't care.

 

[zendraw]

place empty allows checking for a specific object, thats why im asking.

 

[ParodyKnaveBob]

Taking the question literally, you would use place_meeting() because you want to make sure a specific object instance is not present at the location while some other kind of object instance could be but you don't care.

zendraw's right that they (now) do pretty much the same thing. Perhaps under the hood one's faster or something, but the manual shows at some point YYG added an optional argument to place_empty().

place_meeting(x, y, obj_goal) == !place_empty(x, y, obj_goal)

To answer zendraw, you have my indirect answer above. Maybe you'd use one over the other for some hidden reason now – or just frankly that you like the semantics of one over the other, and/or you can skip ! checks – but for probably 15 years or so, place_empty() did not have the optional object argument and was thus more akin to place_free().

Regards,

 

[zendraw]

my only guess is they have some plans for it in the future? perhaps it shuld be tested how taxing is place_meeting vs place_empty.

 

[chamaeleon]

Mea culpa. I had place_free in mind when I replied (which takes solid into consideration of course).

 

[Fielmann]

So you can use the one that lets you avoid the ! sign.