Painless conversion from MonoBehaviour to ScriptableObject?

[SalvoSoftware]

I’ve made a few scripts to represent a Weapon and an Ability.
I didn’t know about ScriptableObjects so I created a WeaponContainer and a AbilityContainer MonoBehaviour which I load from Resources folder depending on the weaponId is saved on persistence.

It works quite well, but it doesn’t seems to be the best way to do stuff, also every time I need to reference any of these I need to navigate into the project folders and drag/drop the prefab into the inspector, and this is getting frustrating! When I discovered ScriptableObjects I wished I could convert the two MonoBehaviours to ScriptableObjects, but I’ve already referenced these MonoBehavious in many scenes of the game so it would mean an intense work of writing down every single reference to restore, and every value of the weapons and of the abilities, otherwise I’ll loose all the data…

Have any of you been in a similar situation? Do you know if there’s any tag that would let me choose the desired prefab in the inspector without doing drag and drop? Or maybe there’s a magic tool that does this work for me

[Kurt-Dekker]

Yuck… I feel for you. I’ve been in this exact situation several times, but your desire to switch to SOs is legitimate.

In the end I bit the bullet and used it as an excuse to refactor all the little tiny things that had been bugging me before, and basically rewrote everything using ScriptableObjects.

But I did it system by system, not all-at-once. And in fact in one game I stood up a separate system alongside the Prefab-based system and kept both of them alive. Someday I might tear down the Prefabs and make equivalent SOs, but… maybe not!

ALSO: don’t even consider doing this without proper source control to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inje…

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are "auto generating" with... I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still bui…

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

[SalvoSoftware]

Wow this is great… I use git all the time in my job with Java, but I had no idea it could be used on Unity!

My story teaches it’s important to do research on technologies before starting a project, as well as analysis, not just searching for stuff in the moment you need them

[Kurt-Dekker]

@SalvoSoftware

it’s important to do research on technologies before starting a project,

But be careful: I cannot tell you how many times I see people on here asking questions like “Should I use Prefabs or ScriptableObjects?” and getting all worried about it and then having analysis paralysis and never starting anything.

Far more important than how you do it, it is critical that you actually GO DO it, and you have done this!

There are an infinite number of possible engineering solutions you can create, and if you don’t try any ofthem because you’re unsure which to do, you’re no different than that weirdo at the party who says “Oh you make games? I have a GREAT GAME IDEA!” Of course as you know, game ideas have zero value. It’s the created game that has value.