Static Types

The way Moonsharp gives you access to static members of a type is through an instance of that type. Kinda weird, but outta my control.

This means you'll have to create an instance just to access the static member.

And if you were paying attention in the section about constructors, you'll remember that you cannot construct an arbitrary reference type (class) from your ModScript.

So, I've manually gone and added instances of some important types containing static members that would be commonly used when coding a game in Unity.

Special Types

Time

Time contains a lot of useful static members for dealing with in-game global time related variables, such as Time.deltaTime for the amount of time passed since the last frame, the Time.timeScale to for how much slow-mo or speed-up there is, and a lot more (read the Unity Time docs)

For example:

local timeGoneBy = 0

function update()
    timeGoneBy = timeGoneBy + Time.deltaTime -- you could also just use Time.time for all this but this is a pedantic example.
end

UnityObject

UnityEngine.Object (exposed as UnityObject) contains three important categories of static members: Instantiate, Destroy, and FindXXX methods.

For example:

local existingFlappy = getItemsByMemeId("FlappyBird")[1] -- requires flappy bird already in the level
local dummyQuaternion = createInstance("Quaternion")
local posOffset = createInstance("Vector3")
posOffset.x, posOffset.y = 2, 1

local flappyClone = UnityObject.Instantiate(
    existingFlappy,
    getItemsByMemeId("MemeorangMan")[1].transform.position + posOffset,
    dummyQuaternion.identity, -- looky here, it's using a static member! (more on this later)
    existingFlappy.transform.parent)

Here's another noteworthy example:

registerType("EnemyMovementController")

local enemyMovementControllers = UnityObject.FindObjectsByType(getType("EnemyMovementController"), 0);

for idx, enemyMovCtrl in ipairs(enemyMovementControllers) do
    print(enemyMovCtrl.MoveForce)
    enemyMovCtrl.MoveForce = 0 -- make all enemies not move
end

Physics2D

Physics2D contains a lot of useful static members for dealing with 2D physics. For example:

registerType("Player")
registerType("PlayerInfo")
registerType("ContactPoint2D")

local player = getCurrentItem().GetComponent("Player")
local playerLeftFootCol = player.Info.LeftFootCollider
-- be careful creating collections, read the collections section to find out why
local contacts = createCollection("System.Collections.Generic.List`1[[UnityEngine.ContactPoint2D, UnityEngine]]")

function getPlayerLeftFootContacts(collider)
    Physics2D.GetContacts(collider, contacts)
    print("Number of contacts: ", contacts.Count)
    return contacts
end

invokeAfterTime(1, getPlayerLeftFootContacts, {playerLeftFootCol})

Mathf

Another useful bad boy, Mathf exposes some static arithmetic functionality, such as

local leCalculation = Mathf.Atan2(420, 69)
print("le calc ", leCalculation)

Static Members

Ok, that was the explanation of static members on reference types that you aren't normally able to construct or gain a reference to. I constructed them for you 👉👈 🥹.

Now how about static members on types you are able to use in your ModScripts?

Well, you'll need an instance of the type to access them from, just like before. You can either create the instance yourself if the type is a struct, or you'll need to obtain an instance using something like GetComponent

local dummyVector2 = createInstance("Vector2")
local pointA, pointB = createInstance("Vector2"), createInstance("Vector2")

pointA.x, pointA.y = 6, 9
pointB.x, pointB.y = 4, 2

local distance = dummyVector2.Distance(pointA, pointB) -- normally accessed as Vector2.Distance in C# Unity
print("distance: ", distance)

So yeah.