Question

I have a large Quad Tree structure, made from generic lists (List<T>) pointing to more lists and so on. These lists are contained in a class: TreeNode<T>

In one such tree I store objects of type GameObject.

In order to make tree updates faster, I want to store a pointer / reference to the containing TreeNode on each GameObject, however… I’m coming across issues caused by the generic type <T> of the TreeNode.

Here is where I have the issue (inside the TreeNode class):

contents.Add(typedObject);
if (typedObject is GameObject)
{
    GameObject gameObject = (GameObject) (object) typedObject;
    gameObject.treeNode = this;
}

I get the error:

Cannot implicitly convert type 'TreeNode<T>' to 'TreeNode<GameObject>'

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Edit –>
The node is stored on the GameObject as follows:

public TreeNode<GameObject> treeNode;

Answer 1

If you don’t know the type of the TreeNode<T> i would suggest to create a non-generic base class. Then you can simply store the reference in the GameObject.

Casting

I would avoid it but you can cast the TreeNode<T> to TreeNode<GameObject> by using the operator as as follows:

gameObject.treeNode = this as TreeNode<GameObject>;