noob question: organizing code?

Unity Engine
1

hello all!

I recently started working with Unity, I got the trial version a little over a month ago and bought the indie version a few days ago :smile:

To be honest I am not a very good programmer (in fact I used to be a 3d artist, then turned level designer and Iā€™m currently working as a game designer). However I do have quite a lot of scripting experience and some programming experience.

Iā€™m currently working on a sort of ā€œsporting gameā€ in unity. Some of my code is starting to get out of hand and I want to spread the code over several files. Can this be done in unity?

I noticed 1 script file turns up as a ā€œcomponentā€ in the editor. Would it be possible to write a class in a separate script file and then use the methods from that class in other scripts? (Iā€™m using c#)

For example I have this class that controls player movement and it uses some functions I wrote to do some geometry stuff (rotating etc). The same functions are used in another script that control a different game object but for now I simply copy/pasted the functions into the other script.

It would be much nicer if I could just put the geometry functions in a separate file and then use them in my other scriptsā€¦

can this be done?

thanks in advance!

2

Well, in JS you can define classes, then instantiate them and use those objects like in any program, so I imagine you can do the same with C#. I do it all the time in JS. No need to add them as components (althought sometimes using the component method is advantageous).

3

Youā€™re supposed to it that way; Unity is heavily designed around it. :slight_smile:

ā€“Eric

4

but do I have to add each script as a component? Or can I simply use code from other scripts without adding them as components?

5

Dependsā€¦static functions can be just scripts somewhere in your project and donā€™t need to be components. Otherwise they do have to be attached to some object, but can be accessed from other scripts. Itā€™s typical to make a ā€œgame managerā€ object, which may have generic functions that can be used by other objects.

ā€“Eric

6

great! Thanks for the help.

Iā€™ve created a VectorFunctionsClass that has a couple of methods I use frequently, I then access those by creating an instance of that class like so:

protected VectorFunctionsClass VectorFunctions = new VectorFunctionsClass();

which works like a charm.
Is this the proper way to do it?

7

That will certainly work, but you can skip creating a new object by making the VectorFunctionsClass class and its functions static. Then whenever you need to access a particular function you can use VectorFunctionsClass.YourFunctionName();