Does the Unity Inspector support Inheritance?

Questions & Answers
1

Not to be confused with this related question, I know Unity does Inheritance but I'd like to leverage it in the Inspector.

I'd like to be able to switch the action to be performed on-the-fly using buttons in the GUI. So, I've got a class `AbstractAction` that inherits from MonoBehaviour which has a single abstract method `DoAction`. I've written a couple of scripts that inherit from AbstractAction and override the method, and I want to assign them to specific slots in the GUI using the inspector (similarly to how I assign the `Texture2D`s for the buttons themselves).

public class MyGui : MonoBehaviour {

    public Texture2D[] buttons;
    public AbstractAction[] actions;

    private int selectedAction;

    void OnGUI() {
        selectedAction = GUILayout.SelectionGrid(0, buttons, 2);
    }

    public void DoSelectedAction() {
        actions[selectedAction].DoAction();
    }
}

My problem is, the array is showing up fine in the Inspector (with elements "None (Abstract Action)"), but I cannot assign my subclasses of AbstractAction to them. Is there a way around this? I've tried using both an actual `abstract` parent, and a normal class with a `virtual` method.

Thanks in advance

2

Turns out this is possible to do. My problem was that I was attempting to drop the script itself into the array in the Inspector. Instead, it was expecting a `GameObject` (or prefab) that has an AbstractAction script (or a script that inherits from it) attached.

Ultimately I created a prefab for each action that contains both the texture and the action script subclass, and therefore only need a single array to define them both in the GUI. Clean, functional and properly captures the relationship between the image and the action!