How can I reference/import one C# script from another?

Questions & Answers
1

Umm, this time I’m going to start with some background.

I come from a Python background, and when working on a large project, you’ll break it up into files, I often do one per major class, and import them back into my main file. For example:

from assets.scripts.classes import controller, settings
from assets.scripts.functions import logging

class GameController():
    myController = controller.Controller()
    mySettings = settings.Settings()
    logging.log("Everything is fine and dandy")

Now, those import scripts are simply living on disk in /assets/scripts/classes/controller.py etc, and they get loaded at run or compile time.

Now, in Unity/C#, the only way I can see to replicate this behaviour, is to create dummy GameObjects in my scene, attach the scripts to them, and then access these GameObjects/scripts from my main script using

Classes = GameObject.Find("Classes")
myController = Classes.GetComponent(Controller).Controller()

But, is this really the “right” way to do it?

Any feedback on how you guys are writing scripts like this would be really fantastic

Thanks
Dave

3

It is probably worth mentioning that you don’t need to attach things to GameObjects though. You can use regular C# classes too, by not inheriting from MonoBehaviour (which will let you use constructers/etc as per “normal” C#).

I personally prefer to have “dummy” GameObjects in the scene that I can tweak visually, but it is an option. The main bonus of doing it the Unity way is that Unity will save all the public and Serialised values for you, which makes initialisation much easier, as well as all the editor extensions/inspector/etc.

Obviously, if you don’t use MonoBehaviour you also won’t benefit from/(be cursed by?) the Awake() Start() OnEnable() etc model, and you also will not be able to StartCoroutine without a reference to a MonoBehaviour to start one on (although you might be able to use threads for some behaviour, although a lot Unity functionality is not thread-safe which will limit what you can do)

Edit: All values was a lie. It will save the ones it knows how to Serialise, which is not “all”. You can’t do more complex datatypes, but Arrays (of supported types), instances of [Serialisable] custom classes, most primatives, and most structs (Vector2/3, etc) will work.

2

Well the classes are available from anywhere within the same namespace - so you don’t need to import them as you do in Python.

What you need is a way of accessing the variables of those classes or the instances of the classes attached to another object. You have a few choices (Unity Gems has a number of articles we wrote on this).

You can:

  1. Add static singleton variables to your classes to access a singleton component (perhaps Controller is like this).
  2. Use GetComponent to access the components on another object (probably not for singletons)
  3. Use the inspector to assign references to the other components that exist between individual objects

There are other methods when you are coding for collisions etc, but those are the primaries.