Is there a way to ignore descendants of an instance for a whitelist?

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#1

I am trying to get parts inside a region with :FindPartsInRegion3WithWhiteList().

The whitelist I set up has some parts inside it. These parts have other parts as children.

Is it possible to ignore descendants of an instance, so that the part I add is the only one that shows in the detection, instead of the part I added and its children?

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#2

Yes and no. You can kind of achieve this by doing a for loop like this

for _,v in pairs(descendants) do
if descendants.Name == “part” then
whatever you want
end
end

doing this will ignore all the others.

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#3

Region3WithWhiteList by default checks descendants of parts you pass to it in a table, no I don’t believe there is a way to turn that option off.

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#4

There really should be. I should be able to use GetChildren() if I wanted to get the descendants. Now I am not sure what to do.

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#5

Weird method, but do repetitive recursion upwards until the parent is not a BasePart, then add that to an array. Repeat this process for all parts returned in the array from FindPartsInRegion3WithWhiteList until the array has been exhausted, then run a function across all the items in the array.

local regionParts = PLACEHOLDER:FindPartsInRegion3WithWhiteList(ARGUMENTS)
local parts = table.create(#regionParts)
local recordedParts = table.create(#regionParts)

for _, part in ipairs(regionParts) do
    local ancestorPart = part

    -- While ancestorPart has a parent and it's a BasePart, look at its parent
    while ancestorPart.Parent and ancestorPart.Parent:IsA("BasePart") do
        ancestorPart = ancestorPart.Parent
    end

    if ancestorPart:IsA("BasePart") and not recordedParts[ancestorPart] then
        table.insert(parts, ancestorPart)
        recordedParts[ancestorPart] = true
    end
end

for _, part in ipairs(parts) do
    -- Insert functionality here
end

I am unaware of any edge cases this may present, as the array returned from FindPartsInRegion3WithWhiteList is explicitly comprised of parts. So here’s what the for loop does:

  • For every part returned in the table, we run a certain operation on them.
  • We set a tracker local variable, ancestorPart, to the part found in the table.
  • If this part has a parent and the parent is a BasePart, we move the ancestorPart up one to the parent BasePart. This continues until either the part doesn’t have a parent or the parent of the part is not a BasePart.
  • We confirm what we’ve found. Is the ancestorPart, after all this, still a BasePart? If yes, place it into a table. We also place it into a secondary table to prevent it from being inserted into the table again if another part shares that part as an ancestor.
  • Once our table has been filtered, we run operations on the collected parts array.

Some things to keep in mind:

  • This is an ugly solution. There is definitely a better way to do this. If there isn’t, then wow this is still a really ugly solution.
  • I do not clean up the recorded parts table, which could present a memory leak. Make sure to clean it up by dislodging all strong references and getting rid of the reference to the table.