Best pracices: Object communication without references

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,

I was wondering how I can get different scripts to communicate with each other and optimize the number of references used.

2

You question is fairly abstract but you might be wanting something like the NotificationCenter script on the wiki http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=NotificationCenter.

Consider this situation, you have a SoundManager script that plays sounds when things happen in the game. You would like loose coupling between the sound manager and game objects. You don’t want each character to have a reference to the sound manager and you don’t want the SoundManager to know about the characters.

Solution:

SoundManager registers with the NotificationCenter to receive events they are interested in.

NotificationCenter.DefaultCenter().AddObserver(this, "OnBumperCollision");
NotificationCenter.DefaultCenter().AddObserver(this, "OnSkidding");

Character objects post notifications when something happens:

NotificationCenter.DefaultCenter().PostNotification(this, "OnBumperCollision");

These scripts don’t need references to each other. The SoundManager script can be re-used in several different games without knowing anything about the Classes used by the characters.

3

have one script call another. traditionally scripts are attached to a game object.

You call them by using getcomponent

in C# its

GameObject.GetComponent<script_name>();

you would store that instance of that script if you needed to reuse it so you didnt have to keep searching

script_name my_script;

my_script = GameObject.GetComponent<script_name>();