Unity ScriptableObjects

2017-12-21

2023-02-21

3 min. read

Scriptable Objects

Introduction

A class you can derive from if you want to create objects that don’t need to be attached to game objects. allow you to create objects which are assets which can either hold custom data or execute code

Examples

One example would be to create a custom asset that holds all the statistics for a given enemy type. Say you want to change the maximum speed of all those enemies. You could simply edit a single value on our ScriptableObject asset, as opposed to having those values stored in the public fields of a MonoBehaviour attached to an enemy prefab or prefabs. This can help with both the centralization of data and version control. These values also persist after being changed in play mode, since we are changing a value on an asset.

Another way that we can use them is to create assets which hold executable code. An example of this is seen in the video series below showing the Pluggable AI System. All of the pieces of code which compose the AI behavior are stored in ScriptableObject assets, which you can then configure and combine in the Inspector, without writing additional code.

One of the use cases that Richard demonstrates in this talk is a pluggable AI system with different ‘brains’ that can be plugged into AI tanks