As the title says, is it possible to organize the hierarchy? I searched prior to posting and only came up with older articles. Some from 2019 and others around 2017. The suggestions were mixed. Some said to use empty objects, while others stated that using an empty object to organize can lead to performance issues later on.
What is the current situation for Organizing the Hierarchy?
I do agree that there should be some sort of proper folder structure to visually group GameObjects together without needing to use an empty GameObject that acts as the “folder”.
I don’t know what the performance impact of using empty GameObjects as labels or folders is (I assume it’s negligible), but I avoid using them as such because it just feels wasteful and code-smelly to include them in builds when they’re only used for editor organization.
Organizing the hierarchy is only doable through the parent/child relationships between GameObjects, and ordering the GameObjects at the same level in the hierarchy. It works similar to organizing files/folders in a filesystem.
Problem is, these relationships are used by Unity and may affect your game’s behavior. Hierarchy order directly affects the layering order of UI objects. Some components or code can only be run on root level objects (DontDestroyOnLoad breaks if you run it on a child for example), child objects move with the movement of their parents, and colliders may behave differently since multiple child colliders can form a compound collider.
So you’d have to take this all into account with your organizing.
I’m not aware of any explicit performance issues. Adding a few additional GameObjects to the scene should have a trivial performance impact.