Workaround for Unity's weird behavior of deserializing some null object references as zombies instead of null - https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/2020

FixUpNullsBehaviour.cs

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// Copyright (c) 2018 David Maas
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using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Reflection;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityObject = UnityEngine.Object;

/// <summary>FixUpNullsBehaviour is a variant of MonoBehaviour for Unity scripts which want to opt-out of the fake null deserialization that Unity uses in the editor.</summary>
/// <remarks>
/// Details about why Unity works this way in the editor can be found in this blog post:
/// https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/16/custom-operator-should-we-keep-it/
/// </remarks>
public abstract class FixUpNullsBehaviour : MonoBehaviour
{
    /// <summary>Fixes references to fake null objects and zombie objects present in the fields of this script.</summary>
    [Conditional("UNITY_EDITOR")]
    protected void ClearFakeNullReferences()
    {
        // Loop through all fields on the object and fixup ones which contain references to zombie Unity objects
        //TODO: Skip fields which Unity would not serialize.
        foreach (FieldInfo field in GetType().GetFields(BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic))
        {
            // Skip fields which don't implement UnityObject
            if (!typeof(UnityObject).IsAssignableFrom(field.FieldType))
            { continue; }

            // Don't bother with MonoBehaviour or ScriptableObject fields, they don't have this issue
            if (typeof(MonoBehaviour).IsAssignableFrom(field.FieldType) || typeof(ScriptableObject).IsAssignableFrom(field.FieldType))
            { continue; }

            // Get the value of the field
            UnityObject unityObject = (UnityObject)field.GetValue(this);

            // If the field is already literally null, don't do anything
            if (unityObject is null)
            { continue; }

            // If it is a zombie object, replace it with null
            if (unityObject == null)
            { field.SetValue(this, null); }
        }
    }

    // We have to use Awake instead of the deserialization callbacks.
    // Deserialization happens off the main thread, and you can't reliably verify a UnityObject exists from other threads.
    // (You might be able to by looking at UnityObject.m_instanceID with reflection, but that's playing with fire.)
    protected virtual void Awake()
        => ClearFakeNullReferences();
}

Hello @PathogenDavid! I'm not sure it is working in Unity 2019.2.6f1. Can you confirm that? Thank you!

Hello! I have not tried it in Unity 2019.2.6f1 yet, but I have successfully used it in 2019.2.4f1 and I wouldn't expect any major changes that'd break this between those two versions.

It's been a while since I made it, but our internal version of this script has some differences. I thought the differences were primarily for compatibility with our internal inspector infrastructure and performance, but maybe they handle some edge cases this original proof-of-concept didn't.

You should try to instead call ClearFakeNullReferences from an implementation of ISerializationCallbackReceiver.OnAfterDeserialize. I thought I made this change for performance, but maybe it handles edge cases where Awake wasn't quite enough.

In order to make that change, I believe you also need to change the way the dummy null check works since deserialization happens off of the main thread, changing it to:

if (unityObject.IsDummyNull())
{ field.SetValue(this, null); }

Where IsDummyNull is the following extension method: (Where UnityObject is an alias for UnityEngine.Object.)

/// <summary>Returns true if this Unity object is a dummy null.</summary>
/// <remarks>
/// Unlike the Unity equality and bool operators, this method is threadsafe.
/// </remarks>
[MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.AggressiveInlining)]
public static bool IsDummyNull(this UnityObject unityObject)
{
    // It has been observed that fake null objects will have an instance ID of 0
    // Since the instance ID is used to test for what is effectively refernece equality:
    // https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference/blob/2019.2.1f1/Runtime/Export/Scripting/UnityEngineObject.bindings.cs#L108
    // We can be confident this is never used as an actual instance ID.
    // The instance ID is not exposed directly, but it is used directly as the hash code:
    // https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference/blob/2019.2.1f1/Runtime/Export/Scripting/UnityEngineObject.bindings.cs#L73-L79
    // We cannot compare unityObject to null here using the == operator because that will indirectly call GetInstanceID, which must be called on the main thread:
    // https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference/blob/2019.2.1f1/Runtime/Export/Scripting/UnityEngineObject.bindings.cs#L69
    // (This method is meant to be called off the main thread. For instance, during deserialization.)
    // Dummy nulls are never present during player builds, so we can skip this check outside of the editor.
#if UNITY_EDITOR
    if (unityObject is null)
    { return false; }

    return unityObject.GetHashCode() == 0;
#else
    return false;
#endif
}

The other change our internal version has is we changed the loop to foreach (FieldInfo field in GetType().GetAllInstanceFields(typeof(FixUpNullsBehaviour))) where GetAllInstanceFields is the following extension method:

public static IEnumerable<FieldInfo> GetAllInstanceFields(this Type type, Type until)
{
    while (type != until && type != null)
    {
        foreach (FieldInfo field in type.GetFields(BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly))
        {
            yield return field;
        }

        type = type.BaseType;
    }
}

This fixes some issues with non-public fields getting skipped in base classes, but I'm not actually sure if it's necessary with Unity's vanilla serializer.

I've been meaning write a blog post with an updated version of this script, but time has been hard to come by lately.

(For the lawyers: The above code snippets in this comment are governed by the same terms as the original Gist.)