This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Mohamed Hijazi
When you are writing the code for your Unity project, it is easy for your to overcomplicate things. You start referencing scripts left and right and create some very unnecessary dependencies where if one script is lost, the whole chain of dependencies breaks down with it.
A very effective solution and to decrease dependencies is to use a new script type called “Interfaces”.
What are Interfaces? And how can you use them?
Definition
An interface is a class type, a container that hold definitions of variables and methods where methods are can hold parameters and must be empty.
Interfaces cannot be added as an instance of a gameObject in the scene nor can it referenced in a script, it can only be inherited by the script.
In other words, an Interface is a contract that holds certain methods that can be called by any script. Let us say you have an Interface I, and 5 scripts. Scripts B,C,D, and E are inheriting interface I, while script A wants to contact the other scripts. Normally you would assign a variable for each script in A and find the gameObjects that hold scripts, B C D & E. But since they inherit from I, then script A can simply call the method in Interface I and do action upon this method without knowing which gameObject holds scripts B C D E.
Real Life Example
In our GameDevHQ mobile project (Mobile Project Progression Report: Enemy Setup Unity), I wanted to have a modular attack system. Instead of referencing every enemy type or any object in the scene that can break, I created an Interface that holds a “Damage” method.
In the enemy script, I inherited from the Interface and added the Damage() method and added code to it.
So now, if I want to hit an enemy or any breakable object, I would simply get hold of the interface instead of referencing the enemy scripts.
Quick Tip
As you have scene, you can add parameters to methods in the Interface. But what if you have 3 different scripts and each script want to call a different parameter type for one method. For example an enemy has a float health variable and another has an int health variable.
In this case we can use a generic Interface that will use a generic placeholder, and this placeholder can change from script to script.
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Unity Interfaces 101 was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Mohamed Hijazi
Mohamed Hijazi | Sciencx (2021-05-30T14:05:20+00:00) Unity Interfaces 101. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/05/30/unity-interfaces-101/
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