Can someone explain calling other scripts in C#?

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Hi, Unity and programming noob here. I've been working with a bunch of tutorials and there's this thing that is popping up that I don't quite understand. I was hoping someone could explain it to me in ELI5 terms.

So I understand what this is when programming:

 public int score;

This variable contains an integer called "score" that has been declared but not initialized; later, I could do something like "score = 5;" and it will set score equal to 5.

Now suppose I have a script by the name of "Dialogue". I set up a couple of variables and things in there, and then in another, separate script I do this:

 public Dialogue dialogue;

What is this? I understand that the "public int score" is a variable that holds an integer by the name of score; is this other thing a variable? What does it hold, all of "Dialogue"? Does it just allow me access to all the items in "Dialogue" from this other script? Why do I have to rename it "dialogue"? Is this concept called "Composition" or "Inheritance" or something (I've heard of those but I don't know what they are)? I'm just a bit confused and if someone can break this down for me in a simple manner I would really appreciate it.

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Answer by Taylor-Libonati · Oct 16, 2017 at 10:45 PM

Dialogue is a variable just like the int. You are holding memory for an object of type dialogue instead of type int.

If you have that reference and try to use it like: dialogue.DoSomething() you will get an error because it is just a reference that hasn't been set to anything.

To assign an instance of the class you would do something like:

 dialogue = new Dialogue();

However the confusing thing is that if your class extends MonoBehaviour then you can't manually create a new Dialogue. You instead are using Unity's built in component system. So to create it you would add it to a GameObject in the Unity Editor, then drag it into the dialogue variable in the inspector.

Unity basically built a drag and drop system for connecting components and variables of classes for convenience.

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Can someone explain calling other scripts in C#?

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