Coroutines with Unity
What is a Coroutine?
A Coroutine is a method in Unity, which allows us to execute game logic over a number of frames. What this means is that we can pause a function and tell it to wait for a condition or action to occur before continuing. Therefore we can split up its functionality into a number of steps that can be executed in order.
When should I use a Coroutine?
It’s worth considering using a Coroutine whenever we want to create an action that needs to pause, perform a series of steps in sequence or if we want to run a task that we know will take longer than a single frame.
How do I write a Coroutine?
In Unity, we call a Coroutine by using the IEnumerator method.
Visual Studio shows us that there will currently be a compiling error with the squiggly line. This is because all IEnumerator methods need to encompass a yield statement.
However, if we attach this script to a game object it is not going to do anything, as we have not set up anything for it to do.
The above code will print to the console every 2 seconds for as long as the program runs, after we start the Coroutine using the below code.
