I’m working with Unity and have encountered an issue related to serialized non-MonoBehaviour classes. Specifically, I have a PlayerController class that derives from MonoBehaviour and contains a public field of type GroundDetection. The GroundDetection class does not derive from MonoBehaviour and is serialized in the Unity Inspector.

Here’s a simplified example:

public class PlayerController : MonoBehaviour
{
    public GroundDetection groundDetection;
}

[System.Serializable]
public class GroundDetection
{
    public float RayDistance;
    public LayerMask GroundLayer;

    public GroundDetection(float rayDistance, LayerMask groundLayer)
    {
        RayDistance = rayDistance;
        GroundLayer = groundLayer;
    }
}

When I modify the GroundDetection fields in the Inspector and then create a new instance of GroundDetection using new GroundDetection(), all the fields reset to their default values.

For instance:

groundDetection = new GroundDetection(this, groundDetection.RayDistance, groundDetection.GroundLayer);

While initializing fields in the constructor (as shown) works, it’s not an ideal solution for multiple non-MonoBehaviour scripts.

Is there a better way to retain the values of serialized fields in non-MonoBehaviour classes when they are edited from the Unity Inspector?

Any guidance or best practices would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Everything is mentioned above.