So i have a bit of a conundrum at the moment. I have a piece of UX (in a Canvas panel) that needs to be shown or hidden, depending on some condition in gameplay logic. Up until now I've been doing this with conditional logic in the Update method of a MonoBehaviour, i.e. something like this:
public GameObject uxPanel;
void Update()
{
if (uxShowCondition)
{
uxPanel.gameObject.SetActive(true);
}
else
{
uxPanel.gameObject.SetActive(false);
}
}
Simple and it works. The problem is that this conditional logic gets called every single frame. I know Unity is optimized for running these Update methods every frame and all that, but still, it seems like an overhead.
An alternative to the above, that I discovered recently, is to trigger an event in the gameplay logic and then show/hide the UX in question in a class that handles said event, using the Observer pattern. That would look like this:
An abstract subject class, i.e. a template for something that is being observed:
public abstract class Subject
{
public event Action OnGameplayEvent;
public virtual void Trigger()
{
OnGameplayEvent?.Invoke();
}
}
A concrete implementation of the abstract class above:
public class MySubject : Subject
{
public override void Trigger()
{
base.Trigger();
}
}
An observer class that listens for events from a subject class:
public class MyObserver : MonoBehaviour
{
private Subject mySubject;
void Start()
{
mySubject.OnGameplayEvent += Subject_OnGameplayEvent;
}
private void Subject_OnGameplayEvent()
{
// Do something here to show or hide the UX panel
}
}
And this is the gameplay class that triggers the event. I am skipping constructors and initializers for the sake of brevity:
public class MyGameplayClass
{
Subject mySubject;
void GameplayLogic()
{
...............
...............
mySubject.Trigger();
}
}
So my question is, which of the two methods above is better for showing and hiding a piece of UX in a Canvas panel? The first one is definitely simpler, but it runs every frame, which may or may not be a problem. I am not sure about that. The second is more complex, but it only runs one time, i.e. when the gameplay logic triggers the event.
