Suggestion: event detectors

[paulmasri]

Within my own code, I have created an event detector script for each event type. See code below.

@lisandroct I propose moving it into this repo instead and build it into the code generator. I am happy to do this and raise a PR and I'd welcome any comments before I get started.

The event detector script has a public OnEventRaised() method. In my scene, I add a game object and add scripts XxxxListener and the corresponding XxxxDetector. I drag a specific event asset into the listener and set the response to OnEventRaised() of the detector. During runtime, whenever that event is raised, OnEventRaised() gets called and does a Debug.Log() identifying the event and its arguments.

EventDetector.cs

using UnityEngine;

namespace PaulMasriStone.EventSystem
{
	public class EventDetector : MonoBehaviour
	{
		public void OnEventRaised()
		{
			Debug.Log($"Raised {gameObject.name}");
		}
	}
}

EventDetectors.cs

using System.Collections;
using UnityEngine;

namespace PaulMasriStone.EventSystem
{
	public abstract class EventDetector<T> : MonoBehaviour
	{
		public void OnEventRaised(T arg1)
		{
			Debug.Log($"Raised {gameObject.name} with {arg1}");
		}
	}

	public abstract class EventDetector<T, U> : MonoBehaviour
	{
		public void OnEventRaised(T arg1, U arg2)
		{
			Debug.Log($"Raised {gameObject.name} with {arg1},{arg2}");
		}
	}

	public abstract class EventDetector<T, U, V> : MonoBehaviour
	{
		public void OnEventRaised(T arg1, U arg2, V arg3)
		{
			Debug.Log($"Raised {gameObject.name} with {arg1},{arg2},{arg3}");
		}
	}

	public abstract class EventDetector<T, U, V, W> : MonoBehaviour
	{
		public void OnEventRaised(T arg1, U arg2, V arg3, W arg4)
		{
			Debug.Log($"Raised {gameObject.name} with {arg1},{arg2},{arg3},{arg4}");
		}
	}
}

FloatDetector.cs

namespace PaulMasriStone.EventSystem
{    
    public class FloatDetector : PaulMasriStone.EventSystem.EventDetector<float>
    {}
}

Example in Unity

[paulmasri]

FYI I have started work on this.

• Create the runtime classes Detector & Detectors
• Add to CodeGenerator.cs & SettingsRegister.cs
• Add detectors to Example project (2020+). I've added detectors to the scene to replace the TickLogger and I've removed the Logger.cs script.
• Add detectors to Example project (<2020)
• Update README

Anything else I need to do?

[lisandroct]

Do you use this detectors just to print in the console or in your actual project are they more extensive?
If we just want to be able to debug on the console, I feel like we can do it directly from the events. We could use some EditorPrefs to debug or not while in the Editor and a preprocessor directive for builds.

[paulmasri]

I'm open to different ways of doing detection.

I use it to print in the console. Typically I have a game object in the scene called Event Detectors and it has a child for each event. This way I can easily enable & disable individual detectors or all of them by ticking/unticking the game objects.

[lisandroct]

I feel like the solution I suggested above would be less tedious (for the user) and more polished. We could even add a Debuggable toggle per event to filter which events we want to debug and which events we don't.
With my solution the hierarchy would look cleaner also.
I can work on this on the weekend.

[paulmasri]

Cool. I'll stop what I'm doing on it and leave this issue to you. (All good learning for me as this repo is stretching my Unity skills. I'll switch over to working on #4.)

[paulmasri]

I like your idea of integrating Debuggable into an event itself. For it to work for me...

Essential

• Debuggable can be changed during runtime
• Debuggable can be set ahead of runtime

Desirable

• Debuggable is automatically disabled (or better still stripped out) for any builds outside Unity (e.g. build for Windows standalone). Is there a #define that can be tested against for this condition (similar to #if UNITY_EDITOR?) and all the code relating to Debuggable sits within that?
• A way of enabling/disabling all event debuggables in one go. Ideally before and at runtime, but I'd be happy if I can at least do it before runtime. Sometimes when debugging, I want to disable them all so that I can see other data in the console without clutter. My current method is to activate/deactivate the EventDetectors game object in my scene because this is the parent of all the individual detectors. If everything is being handled within the event assets themselves, I'm not sure how this could be achieved.