Question about UnityEvents

Getting Started
1

I have been messing around with UnityEvents and really like them! I’ve been looking at a lot of different tutorials and noticed that there seems to be two ways to use them and I’m just curious if there’s a functional difference between the two that I should be aware of. I hope the terms I use make sense… I’m still wrapping my head around that as well.

Method 1 - Serialize at the top, then create variables with a type that matches the serialized definition followed by the name of the event.

[System.Serializable] public class CheckForWin : UnityEvent<int, int, int> { }
...
public UIScoreUpdate OnUpdateUIScore;

Method 2 - Serialize at the top, then create variables of type UnityEvent and include the parameters if present, followed by the name of the event.

[System.Serializable] public class CheckForWin : UnityEvent<int, int, int> { }
...
public UnityEvent<int, int, int> OnUpdateUIScore;

The second method looks a whole lot cleaner and is far more intuitive to me but I’m curious if I’m setting myself up for frustrations later on with that approach.

2

The former method is required in somewhat older versions of Unity (I’m thinking around < 2019 versions) because there was no support for generic serialization.
If you wanted a UnityEvent with parameters to show up in the inspector, you had to make a dedicated non-generic class that inherits from a generic UnityEvent type, and create a field of that inherited type instead.

Newer versions of Unity do support generic serialization though, and the latter method is perfectly fine to use with them.

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