Can I make Prefabs that contain other Prefabs?

Questions & Answers
1

I’m trying to create a prefab of prefabs without losing all the connections.

Let me elaborate:
I have a barrel that is a mesh and some scripts assigned. So I create a prefab of it so I can place it throughout my levels easily.

I decide sometimes I want a group of stacked barrels sometimes instead of just one. So I create an empty game object that has 4 children that are my original barrel so I can easily place stacks of barrels throughout my levels.

However once I make a prefab of this empty game object I lose all the connection between the original barrel and the child barrel. This isn’t ideal as I’d still like the barrel children to be ‘barrels’ so if I add a script or change a value in the original I’d like any barrel anywhere to take this data… however since I’ve lost the link between the orignal this doesn’t happen.

Is there a better way to do this?

2

Nested prefabs is on the wishlist, go vote. :wink:

What you could do to maintain your working structure is to have placeholders in the level, then in Awake() or Start() instantiate them.

function Awake () {
    var placeholders : GameObject[] = GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("BarrelSpawn")
    for (var placeholder in placeholders) {
           Instantiate (barrelPrefab, placeholder.transform.position, placeholder.transform.rotation);
    }
}
4

I you are still interested by nested prefabs in prefabs, I have created an editor extension :
http://u3d.as/content/bento-studio/nested-prefab/2Jz

This extension allows you to make prefabs that contains other prefabs and so on.

3

Since I already had a copy of all my prefabs as well as having created a number of objects that contained versions of these prefabs, here is the code I ended up using:

public class NestedPrefabScript : MonoBehaviour {

public Transform[] m_NestedPrefabList;

// Use this for initialization
void Start () {
	foreach (Transform child in transform)
	{
		foreach (Transform nestedPrefab in m_NestedPrefabList)
		{				
			Debug.Log(child.name + " " + nestedPrefab.name);
			if (child.name == nestedPrefab.name)
			{
				Vector3 childPos =  child.position;
				Quaternion childRot = child.rotation;
				
				if (child.collider)
					child.collider.enabled = false;
				Destroy(child.gameObject);
				
				Debug.Log("Replaced!");
				Instantiate(nestedPrefab, childPos, childRot);
			}
		}
	}
	
	transform.DetachChildren();
	Destroy(gameObject);
}

Caveats are that my parent object that contains all the nested objects was empty other than being a container for all my nested objects.

Worked for me. Hopefully someone else finds it remotely useful.