We already discussed Game Objects and Components as two of the fundamental building blocks of the Unity Engine. Today, we’ll discuss their programmatic representation.
This is Unity for Software Engineers, a series for folks familiar with software development best practices seeking an accelerated introduction to Unity as an engine and editor.
The Unity Engine runtime is primarily written in C++, and much of the Engine’s primitives (such as the game objects and their components) live in C++ land. You’ll also know that the Unity Engine API is in C#. The API gives you access to all of Unity’s native objects in a way that — save for a few pitfalls we’ll discuss today — feels like intuitive, idiomatic C#.
UnityEngine.Object, GameObject, ScriptableObject, Component, and their children. This should map to the conceptual hierarchy of how to think about these objects, though sometimes the runtime implementation will look different.UnityEngine.Object
At the top of the Unity Object hierarchy sits UnityEngine.Object. For the most part provides a name string, an int GetInstanceID() method, and a bunch of equality comparers.
The class also provides a static void Destroy(Object obj) method (and some overloads) that destroys a UnityEngine.Object and any of its subclasses. When an Object is destroyed, the native part of the object is freed…
