Object-oriented development
Develop Unity projects with the traditional object-oriented programming philosophy and architecture.
Read time 2 minutesLast updated 6 days ago
Traditional Unity projects are grounded in object-oriented design principles and programming philosophy, which is centered around objects, their properties and functions, and the relations between these objects. Code is organized around GameObjects whose behavior is controlled by attached MonoBehaviour components. In general, these MonoBehaviour components encapsulate logic (methods) and data (fields) together, which can be convenient but can have performance issues at scale.
An alternative to object-oriented development is data-oriented development, which is both a design philosophy and a set of technologies that help you implement that philosophy. This approach stresses a clear separation between code and data to maximize CPU cache efficiency and parallelism. Instead of MonoBehaviours, the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture uses components for data, and systems for logic. The data-oriented approach offers strong performance advantages at scale but can be more challenging for inexperienced developers to learn.
Object-oriented and data-oriented development are not mutually exclusive and you can combine elements from both. For information on data-oriented development, refer to Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack.
Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| Fundamental Unity types | Understand some of the fundamental C# types that Unity provides and their special significance and behavior in the Unity Editor and runtime. |
| Managing update and execution order | Understand the order in which Unity executes your script components and the lifecycle callbacks within those scripts during the runtime application loop. |
| Managing time and frame rate | Understand how Unity measures time so you can manage the rate at which time passes in your application and ensure values update according to the appropriate time scale. |
| Split tasks across frames with coroutines | Split the execution of a task synchronously across multiple scenes with coroutines. This can be useful for tasks that should progress gradually over several frames, such as a fade out effect. |
| Interacting with web servers | Use the UnityWebRequest system to allow your application to interact with a web server via HTTP. |
| Handle type data generically with Unity Properties | Use the Unity Properties API to generically discover and manipulate object properties at runtime. |
| Programming with mathematics | Use Unity's mathematical APIs to apply trigonometric, logarithmic, and other functions in your application, move objects with vectors, and generate random values. |