Have several classes with a common interface, but still able to access MonoBehaviour methods through that interface?

Question

In our project we used to have a PlayerObject class and then Unit and Building derived from that class. We recently started taking a look at Bolt, which requires classes that define objects that may have different states to inherit directly from a Bolt class. So Unit and Building can no longer inherit from PlayerObject.

This turns out to create a few problems, a significant portion of our game uses PlayerObject rather than Unit or Building to perform actions that are the same for both. Separating them would really throw a wrench into the program, since you now have to have methods that use both Unit and Building instead of just PlayerObject.

I thought making a common interface IPlayerObject, and defining common properties and methods in the interface and making Building and Unit both derive from IPlayerObject would do the trick. I did not think it through enough and came to find out that if I use IPlayerObject I can no longer access MonoBehaviour methods and fields (such as transform, or render).

Can I make this in such a way that I can use the IPlayerObject type, with a Unit or Building type and still have access to MonoBehaviour through that interface?

If not, is there a proper way to do this, past just adding in extra methods to handle Unit and Building types separately.

Answer 1

I guess you have two suboptimal options here. So my short answer would be:No, you cannot do this.

Either go the way of composition (as suggested in the comments) or design your IPlayer Interface. That, however requires you to write a complete Interface for MonoBehaviour. If you have done that, I don't think you'll going to be happy because you would basically have to implement all the MonoBehavior implementation again on the Class which inherits IPlayerObject.