Logger Class, Singletons, and the “Big Debate”™

So I’ve spent a bit of time working on getting a logger class setup, which is rudimentarily complete.  This class currently just writes out to a file and also to the debug console in Unity.  It takes in a message, a module, and a severity.  I wanted to easily have access to this class from anywhere, but since it writes to a file, I also needed to ensure that there was ever only one instance trying to access the file at a time.  This, of course, led to the singleton pattern.

Now, even a cursory glance through newbie programming blogs and books can cause one to question why this is even a pattern to begin with – it seems that everyone says to stay away from them, and I kind of understand why you don’t want to overuse them.  The Debug Log has a pretty good episode about them here.

So, singleton was the answer, and it was setup nicely enough and it works, though I still need to make it threadsafe.  But… logging:

LOG!
LOG!

So, now it’s back to work on the game itself.  I have most of the systems in place to get a sample level up and running soon.  Yay!