Any way to check for specific instances inside an object without a for loop

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
,
1

i want to check if theres decals inside an object, but i want to do it without doing something like this:

	for i,decals in pairs(part:GetChildren()) do
		if decals:IsA("Decal") then
			-- blah blah blah
		end
	end

since my code is spaghetti enough and i want to make it more optimized, and mainly to reduce lag since its in a for loop that does its thing every renderstepped

2

You should be able to use an event such as .ChildAdded to make it run less times.

Otherwise if you are adding a decal in another script you should be able to :Fire a signal to let other scripts know to do this stuff.

3

yes but the thing is the decal isn’t being added, i probably should make myself more clear with what i’m trying to do

i’m making a chromatic aberration script, and it clones every part in workspace every renderstepped using a for loop (i know that causes lag, i’ll optimize it later) and i want to check if theres a texture/decal in the part that it’s cloning to remove it, causing less lag and also making the chromatic aberration fit the style my game is in more

but using a for loop would be pretty meh to do, since it both makes my script more messy and could cause more lag, not completely sure about that though

4

but if there isn’t any other way then it’s alright i guess

5

It would be inefficient to constantly generate a new table of children and traverse it every frame like what you described, so instead you should be utilizing events to create a singular table for all your decals.

local Children: {Instance} = script:GetChildren()
local Decals: {Decal} = table.create(#Children) -- Pre-Allocation

do
	local function OnChildAdded(Child: Instance): ()
		if Child:IsA("Decal") then
			table.insert(Decals, Child)
		end
	end
	
	local function OnChildRemoved(Child: Instance): ()
		if Child:IsA("Decal") then
			local Index: number? = table.find(Decals, Child)

			if Index then
				table.remove(Decals, Index)
			end
		end
	end
	
	for Index: number, Child: Instance in Children do
		OnChildAdded(Child)
	end
	
	script.ChildAdded:Connect(OnChildAdded)
	script.ChildRemoved:Connect(OnChildRemoved)
end

Then all you have to do is traverse the Decals array each frame. Hooray for optimization!