GameObject Name Redirector in Unity

Intro

A few days ago my friend stumbled across a problem because of the usage of GameObject.Find, it can’t find the game object because the game object was renamed. So, I thought we can have something like Unreal Engine redirector to solve this problem.

In Unity, There is FormerlySerializedAsAttribute, which is used to rename a field without losing its serialized value.

Structure

Data

• GameObjects

  This data comes from Unity Engine itself, to retrieve this I use

  Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll(typeof(GameObject));
  

• ScriptableObject

  The scriptable object is used to store all the game objects. I create a custom class to hold the required data.

  public class NameConfig
  {
      public int hashCode;
      public string oldName;
      public string newName;
  }
  

  • The hash code is the game object hash code, it uses to check whether a game object name is changed or not.
  • Old name store the current game object name.
  • New name store the new game object name.

System

Since I can not find any event for rename I use EditorApplication.hierarchyChanged, below is the step I do to check rename in the game object.

• Listen to EditorApplication.hierarchyChanged.
• When there is any change in hierarchy,
• Find the data that match the hash code of the current game object.
• If any change then stores the new name otherwise clear it.

I also use a MenuItem to create a menu to register all the game objects manually. It will directly store the data in the ScriptableObject, I use it because working with ScriptableObject is easy and does not require any parsing.

API

I want to override GameObject.Find but it seems I can’t do that, so I create an extension method so it gonna looks more natural,

gameObject.FindByName("game object name");

Conclusion

The GameObject.Find can be solved using redirector, but it is gonna need more improvement in the future. This experiment’s purpose is to be a proof of concept. But it gonna need more effort to make a better and more advanced version of the redirector.

Improvement

• Make sure if the hash code is persistent, I am not testing this yet.
• Change ScriptableObject to store data into text-based, e.g json, csv.
• Asset redirector, this gonna need to connect between the redirector data and the engine itself, besides the redirector needs to be compatible with the engine too.
• Script Redirector, use hash code to track any changes, basically similar to this experiment.

You can take a look at the code here.

Thank you for reading 😃 I hope you enjoy it.

Have a nice day.