I need this explained once and for all

Unity Engine
1

I can’t handle how often Unity pukes on my prefabs. So would someone PLEASE tell me what’s going on?

We are building a puzzle game for Android where my prefabs are manually placed into a LOT of similar scenes. Manually changing a value on the objects in each scene just isn’t an option as it would take FOREVER to load up each scene individually.

We can’t edit more than one child deep (which is ridiculous for so many reasons).

So, can’t edit prefabs within Assets/, and can’t (shouldn’t) edit it in each scene. Solution? Drag the prefab into the scene, edit, click apply when finished, then delete. Totally hacky, and I can’t believe Unity is still using this as the primary method of working with the engine. It’s almost embarrassing. But I digress.

The issue we’re having is with the Transform. I’ve got blocks and objects positioned and rotated all over every scene, all dragged into the scene from prefabs. If I edit a value on a script in one of the prefabs and click apply to change all the prefabs, every prefab in all the other scenes 100% copy that prefab. Meaning rotation, scale, position… everything. This is so bad. It literally destroys EVERYTHING since the puzzle game is about the placement of objects. If I click and drag a new object into the scene to edit the same thing happens.

There’s a kicker though. Sometimes when this happens it only happens to some of the objects. But they’re all from the same prefab… I know because if I edit the topmost object in Assets/ everything changes in all scenes and that’s good. For instance, I’ll click and drag a block into a scene and it’s arbitrarily sitting at, say, 0, 1, 2. I edit the components I needed to edit, click apply, then delete. Now in scenes 3, 5, and 10, those blocks are all at 0, 1, 2, but other scenes are unchanged… rips out hair.

This is the most ridiculous and unexpected (and holy crap frustrating) behavior and I want so desperately for someone to explain what I’m doing wrong.

Ok that was a little ranty, but honestly I really need help with this. I have tried so many ways of figuring out how this all behaves and I just can’t grasp it.

BTW, don’t try to sell me your asset from the store. I’m feeling like, for this issue, there should not be a band-aid. Unity needs to have a solution. If Unity doesn’t have a solution I’ll go find some asset after I rage quit, but I don’t want this thread to dissolve into users trying to sell me their store assets (which has happened to me before).

Thanks in advance for the help.

2

I’m not really addressing your prefab rant, and I’m not sure if there is a good answer, but one solution is to have some levels of abstraction between your level design and your block attributes. For example:

  • Instead of tweaking script values directly on blocks, have block types assigned to profiles, like “bonus block”, “death block”, whatever. It would just be an enum dropdown on the block. Then in Start() for the block, it looks at some static gamestate object for what the exact definition of a “bonus block” is, i.e. hit points, powerup, score, etc. Then you tweak the profiles on the static gamestate object instead of individual prefabs.
  • Approaching it from the other direction, when placing blocks down on the grid in the editor, your “grid square” class could be smart enough to know what block prefab has been placed inside it. Then every time the level is loaded, it instantiates the prefab and forces it into its grid square, so whatever arbitrary position the prefab happens to have is irrelevant.