Scripting Strategies

Since scripting will consume a great deal of our development time, it will be enormously beneficial to learn some best practices. Scripting is a very broad term, so we will try to limit our exposure in this chapter to situations that are very Unity-specific, focusing on problems surrounding MonoBehaviours, GameObjects, and related functionality.

We will discuss the nuances and advanced topics of the C# language, .NET library, and Mono framework in Chapter 8, Masterful Memory Management.

In this chapter, we will explore ways of applying performance enhancements for the following:

Obtaining components in other game objects
Optimizing component callbacks (Update(), Awake(), and so on)
Using coroutines
Using GameObject and Transform efficiently
Exchanging messages between different objects
Optimizing mathematical calculations
Serializing/deserializing during scene and Prefab loading

Whether you have some specific problems in mind that you wish to solve or you just want to learn some techniques for future reference, this chapter will introduce you to a wide array of methods that you can use to improve your scripting efforts now and in the future. In each case, we will explore how and why the performance issue arises, an example situation in which the problem occurs, and one or more solutions to combat the issue.