CacheBehaviour

CacheBehaviour and FastCacheBehaviour

There are two reasons not to use the default component properties (e.g. rigidBody, particleSystem, etc) on MonoBehaviour:

1. The properties do no caching, so each time you use the property you are calling GetComponent.
2. Unity 5 is removing all of them aside from the transform property (which it will start caching).

The two scripts in this folder act as replacements as script base classes instead of using MonoBehaviour directly, but each behave differently.

CacheBehaviour is the safer of the two and is a drop-in replacement for MonoBehaviour. The properties will check the cache variable and call GetComponent anytime the cached value is invalid.

FastCacheBehaviour uses fields instead of properties. This makes accessing the components much faster but means you have to do some work to retrieve the values. The easiest solution is to call ResetCache() in the Start() or OnEnable() methods of your subclass, but you can also use the component specific methods (e.g. ResetRigidbodyCache()) or just manually call GetComponent yourself and assign the value. This adds some extra work, but then the cached values are just plain fields, with the quickest access possible.

If you're not calling into a lot of the components each frame, CacheBehaviour is the simpler of the two, but if you're accessing a lot of components frequently, FastCacheBehaviour might be the better way to go.