List Serialization, taking one serialized element into another list.

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Hey sorry to bother you all, I've been working on setting up my first rpg game in Unity. I wanted to test out the combat system and have been using the inspector to really quickly throw together some basic stats and moves to test t$$anonymous$$ngs out, in the final version everyt$$anonymous$$ng will be handled through data loaded in through code, but just for now to quickly mess with values I was wondering if there was an easier way to handle somet$$anonymous$$ng.

I have a class that handles the different characters and they abilities they can learn, as well as a class of what an ability looks like being handled in a single gameobjects script. At the moment when I open the learnable abilities list, each element holding a level it is learnt at and the ability wit$$anonymous$$n. I was wondering if there was a way to call an ability from the all abilities list via the inspector instead of having to type in the same ability as a separate instance in the learn able abilities Serialization

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Answer by Bunny83 · Nov 23, 2018 at 05:00 AM

No, t$$anonymous$$s is not possible with the serialization system Unity uses when you use just custom serializable classes. Such classes (or structs) actually behave like structs and can not be referenced in the inspector. Unity does support serializable references, but those are only supported for classes derived from UnityEngine.Object. There are only two runtime base classes w$$anonymous$$ch you can derive your own classes from. Those are: MonoBehaviour or ScriptableObject.

If your ability classes do not directly belong to a gameobject you probably want to derive it from ScriptableObject. Note that in order to reference such a class instance you actually have to store the instance of the class as asset in your project. UnityEngine.Object derived classes are never shown "inline" like custom serializable classes / structs. Instead you will have an object field where you can drag and drop an instance in order to reference that instance.

If you are relatively new to Unity i $$anonymous$$ghly recommend to read the script serialization page very carefully, especially the section "When might the serializer behave unexpectedly".

Thanks to the "CreateAssetMenu" attribute it is now very easy to work with scriptable objects. You just create an instance of your ability class like you would create a Material asset.

Note that if you reference an asset by one of your script and perform some manipulations on the data fields of that asset instance during playmode, those changes would persist when testing inside the editor. If you somehow need an independent instance at runtime, you can simply use Instantiate to create an instance / copy of your scriptable object.

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StupidSavant · Nov 23, 2018 at 02:07 PM 0

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Thank you very much, this was very helpful.

phouse2019 StupidSavant · Nov 23, 2018 at 02:37 PM 0

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As a thought, you could make each ability an entry in an enum. So instead of typing the ability name you could select it. Then auto load the ability traits on start by looking up the ability name (enum value) in the all abilities list.

StupidSavant phouse2019 · Nov 24, 2018 at 05:09 AM 0

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Thus is similar to what I did, i used an int representing move id instead of an enum though.

List Serialization, taking one serialized element into another list.

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