Easy way to handle pooled prefabs?

Questions & Answers
1

Object pooling is really useful for prefabs that you need to instantiate many times. However, one benefit in using Instantiate is it ensures that your prefab is in a default state.

I’m using a prefab object pool at the moment that makes sure that the prefab has an IResettable component (i.e. so I can reset it to its initial state on Release). However, I frequently forget to reset certain parts of the prefab. Is there a better way to reset the pooled prefabs to their initial states from the original prefab? Is there a kind of “InstantiateOverwrite” method that could overwrite the data without allocating memory?

2

Personally i would use C# reflection to do this.
First of all, i would return the initially pooled instances in a FIFO manner (first in first out) , that way i return all the “unused” prefabs first (since those have the “default” values).
Then as soon as i’m done with those and i have to recycle used ones, i would just bulk reset all the used instances using reflection , just iterate over all the fields of every component and copy the values from the source prefab.
If that operation causes a hiccup in the FPS , you can do it over multiple frames or during loading screens