Singleton pattern in Unity

The singleton pattern is a design pattern that restricts the instantiation of a class to a single instance and provides a global point of access to that instance. This is particularly useful in game development when you need to manage shared resources or configurations, such as game settings, audio managers, or player controllers.

To implement the singleton pattern in Unity, you can create a generic singleton class that can be inherited by any MonoBehaviour class. Here’s an example of how to do this:

public class Singleton<T> : MonoBehaviour where T : MonoBehaviour {
    public static T Instance {
        get; private set;
    }

    protected virtual void Awake() {
        if(Instance != null && Instance != this) {
            Destroy(gameObject);
        }

        Instance = this;
    }
}

In this example, we define a generic class Singleton<T> that inherits from MonoBehaviour. The Instance property is a static property that holds the single instance of the class. In the Awake method, we check if an instance already exists. If it does and it’s not the current instance, we destroy the current game object to ensure that only one instance exists. Otherwise, we set the Instance property to the current instance.