Question What-all does System.NonSerialized do?

I know that it stops the editor from showing public variables in the inspector for scene objects. But it also seems to stop variables that have prefabs that were attached to them in the Project view from being used in the scene. All of a sudden the reference is null. Why is that?

 

Serialization is the way Unity copies and saves pretty much everything. It is:

• How data in your scripts in the scene are stored in scene and prefab files
• How data is shown in the inspector
• How data is copied when you copy an object using the inspector
• How data is serialized into and out of objects when using JsonUtility.

Basically, if something is serialized, the Unity engine can deal with the data in it. If it's not, it is invisible to the Unity engine and only exists in the managed memory of your C# scripts.

If the reference is not serialized, it cannot be saved to scene or prefab files and Unity will not be able to save the reference anywhere.

Variables that are

public

or marked with

SerializeField

will be serialized. Fields that are not public, or are marked with

NonSerialized

will not be serialized.

 

Hmmmm thanks for the info. I wish the manual said as much. All it said was it stopped things from showing in the inspector.

 

More information about Unity serialization can be found here (including mentions to how it is used):
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/script-Serialization.html

 

Also most concepts in unity related to C# are in conjunction with the original C# concepts. This means there is a great value reading MS's documentation for most things.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.nonserializedattribute?view=netstandard-2.1