Tried to create a Service locator...

[oak tangle]

Hello peep(s), This is pkay and I wanted to share something I created yesterday. Its a Service Locator with a Singleton. The reason I created this because :

1. GameObject.Find("blah") is a bit heavy when it comes to thousands of gameobjects.

2. Secondly, I don't like Unity's drag and drop system, though I wanted something to do exactly what it does but with same O(1) time complexity... but through code.

In this post, everyone is welcome which can suggest improvements and other insights.

Do not hesitate to share your thoughts also suggest me some good architectural designs, I really struggle to find'em.

Thanks 🐱‍👤

[oak tangle]

Also I wanted to ask that when I am Pushing the service of InputManager in the Service Locator via Awake() then why I am getting a NullReferenceException when pulling that same Service in OnEnable() in SwordHandAnim.cs. As for now I have changed it to Start() for avoiding errors

[fading aurora]

Awake is only called on active gameobjects, maybe that's it?
In other service locators I think you often define the default instance registration at app start, in unity you could do this with https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethodAttribute.html
(caveat: I'd put a log in such methods since they'll always run at start, so there is a chance you might overlook removing them when you don't need them anymore and they interfering with your logic)

I made a service locator myself but i haven't used it much, it's a very simple implementation though
https://gist.github.com/FleshMobProductions/5588306c3d554154c65b6b9599eef8af
(later in my local code I added something to check some assemblies through reflection at game start and check if a type had an attribute on a static Instance property of its class, and if so add it to the provider automatically. I think i disabled that behaviour for now though and would register instances manually if i had to use it)

Big O notation i feel like doesn't matter much here as your input size will likely not be a lot.
the architectural benefits could be nice though,
if you combine that with service instances being returned as interfaces, you could also do something like: in a context of tests you set up different instances to be returned than in the production code.

GameObject.Find("blah") is a bit heavy when it comes to thousands of gameobjects
true, and it can be really nice to just handle stuff in code, over lets say inspector assignments.

the simplest approach I had to that was just to have a class that holds a static instance of a given object https://gist.github.com/FleshMobProductions/a73b4c49db3c02925346a0922fd61e40

[oak tangle]

The gameObjects are active though

I like the idea of how you store the references in the form of events. Now I feel that using an interface for that was a redundant thing 😅 .

Btw if I may ask how long have you been doing programming and Unity, cuz your code is some Enigma stuff (its a compliment).

[fading aurora]

thanks
my code quality isn't that great honestly - it just doesn't show in this example because it's little code + for github i sometimes try to make it a bit cleaner than I usually do ^^

I've been doing unity stuff since early 2017, but my biggest improvement came in the first year or year and a half when i underwent a project that might have been too difficult at that time, but i learned a lot
also the last few years I haven't been doing much sadly