Introducing the Reference Finder: Simplifying Unity Development (Part I)

If you’re a Unity developer, you know that finding and managing the right references can take up a considerable amount of time. But don’t worry! Our Junior Unity Developer, Francisco Leites, has come up with a solution.

During his training hours at Exaud, he created an in-house open source tool called Reference Finder that automates the process of finding references to objects in Unity scenes. In this article, he’ll share the benefits and provide a step-by-step guide to use this tool. Let’s begin!

What is “Training” and how I Used It

Exaud provides their developers with an opportunity to invest in their professional growth. Specifically, the company offers 2 hours a week for developers to learn new technologies and improve their existing knowledge. These hours can be split up throughout the week and used for personal projects or training sessions. It’s also a great way to take a break from their current project, which can help them return to the work with a fresh perspective.

For me, when developing a project, I would decide on the week’s objectives over the prior weekend and plan how to distribute my hours accordingly. For example, if the objective was to get a feature working, I would spend the full 2 hours in a day. However, if the objective was to research a particular approach to a solution or code refactoring, I would settle for small chunks of 30 mins over 4 days of the week. It took me a while to get used to this methodology, but after some time it became second nature, and it definitely helped me to stay motivated in the project, making steady progress over the course of several weeks.

Reference Finder Introduction

During the development of one of Exaud’s Unity projects, while fixing a bug or implementing a new feature, I would come across some problems related to finding references to objects in a scene by other objects. It could take me long periods of time to find these references, and I would sometimes have to ask higher-ups or people that knew more about the project to help me find them. It could even be that, after all that time searching, I wouldn’t find what I was looking for, wasting precious development time (and my patience).

The Unity Editor allows a developer to find references to a component in a scene by right-clicking the component and selecting the “Find References on Scene” option. However, this approach has a few problems – at least as of the time of writing and in versions 2021 and earlier of the Unity Engine:

– Finding references to a GameObject is impossible.

– These references are scene only, not finding references on the prefab or the prefab preview stage.

While there are some tools available to help with this problem (both paid and free), I set out to create a tool that would find references of objects in all open scenes, assets and the prefab stage using the (kind of) new UI building system from Unity, the UI Elements. I opted to make it open source to help other developers that want to know how it works and can extend the solution as they see fit, and for education purposes, as some of the implementations were based on circumventions or exploiting of Unity’s frameworks, which are often difficult to find or poorly documented.

How Does It Work?

On the user side, the tool has has several elements that compose each part of it. The tool is divided into the Toolbar, the search type, the search parameters, the ‘Find References’ button and, finally, the references lists.

The toolbar provides some options to the user, such as clearing the results, reseting the tool and changing the tool’s logging type.

The search type presents the user with three options, “Auto GameObject” which filters the search parameters to only show GameObjects; “Auto ScriptableObject” which filters the search parameters to only show ScriptableObjects; and “Any” which shows all available objects to the user, with no restrictions.

By default, the Find References button is disabled and shows a tooltip message if the user hovers the mouse over it. Once the user selects a type and an object, the button becomes available.

Clicking the button shows the search results and displays them in a list per area. If no references are found in a particular area, a message saying “No references found at [area name here]” is displayed. Clicking any of the references will lead the user to the respective Object where the reference was found.

Thank you for reading part one of our article on Reference Finder! We hope you found it informative and helpful. Stay tuned for part two, where we will dive deeper into the features and functionalities of this useful tool.