In the few apps that have this, it’s known as Undo/Redo Selection Change, and described in my post above, as ideally suited to alt+z/alt+Y respectively.
This should operate the same (on the hierarchy selection), regardless of focus.
1 Like
This is akin to what AngryPenguin was speaking of, and as a quick aside, i didn’t know you could do this in visual studio so i’ve been control and minusing myself all over lately, so thanks to him for that tip.
This would be another handy addition to allow us to go over everything we’ve selected recetly, but what I’m advocating for here would be a short list of every component we’ve recently modified, not just selected (again this would be based on the already existing undo list that exists within unity), I think that would be more helpful as we often click many parent components, and components referencing other things in our adventure to find that component we’re actually looking to work on.
So here’s a quick example of how this might work: You’re working on a creature that attacks from range. You click play and you notice the projectile collision isn’t big enough, the creature has too little HP, and you find that the player stun ability is a tad too powerful, so you hop over to the projectile, you increase the radius of its collision, you hunt down the creature, and adjust its HP up a bit, and you locate the ability with stun and lower it a tad. You press play again thinking, ok this should be good, and find you nerfed stun a bit too much… Ok it’s time to hunt that thing down again so you can modify it back up a tad…
Did a mock up so this makes more sense, using the existing prefab overrides as a base template:
1 Like
Well… if you’re gonna go this far (and I’m not disagreeing) let’s get reciprocal linking between properties in the Inspector and their representation in Animation timelines in Legacy Animation, Animators and Timeline, so we can easily go back and forth, and have whatever is selected in Hierarchy and Inspector also highlighted in the Animation timeline, and vice-versa.
At the moment, it’s only object aware, but not Component or Property aware in terms of highlighting, which is just silly.
History feature in Photoshop operates similarly to this, and isn’t a horrible idea. It’s one of the better additions to Photoshop. If portions of this History were then able to be “actioned” so that they could be performed automatically on other objects, dreamy…
Right, but isn’t this what prefabs essentially do? Allow you to propagate your design changes elsewhere with ease assuming you’ve developed your content in a logical parent/ child prefab hierarchy.
The spirit of this post was to try to expand on existing functionality in a way that solves the biggest and most pain-in-the-ass and common design challenges in ways that are feasible: “low hanging fruit”. The prefab system has become a bit notorious for being hard to expand on, and an overarching element that makes expanding on UI a massive headache as every single element in Unity tends to be something now tied to prefabs and inheritance so it complicates things to a massive degree.
What I think makes the “recently worked on” idea worth persuing, is it builds on 2 already existing functions of Unity: the internal undo list (that currently only exposes the most recent action, as you obviously can’t “time travel” to actions further in the list without more features) and the “overrides” UI of the prefab system.
Do I think the above idea is as simple as tying the two together? Obviously not. But it would be worth persuing, and in doing so might highlight other kinks in the pipeline regarding components and prefabs in the hopes of streamlining the way the UI interacts with prefabs so lateral moves can be made with the UI in the future.
Judging by the contextual functionality of “properties”, there seems too many unique use case scenarios between scene and project level editing. Rather than being contextual, a toggle between prefab and scene modification might be the best solution, as you’re generally either making unique changes to a scene, or attempting to adjust core prefabs and overarching gameplay. This seems to be a core bottleneck of moving things forward with the UI with things feeling a bit muddy in regards to working with prefabs vs scene assets and the functionality of UI and pipelines suffer.
I’m sure i’m oversimplifying all of this and I don’t know the underlying restrictions and architecture as well as the guys at Unity, but I think we can all agree that things are muddy, and not perfectly implemented and before the UI can move forward, cleanup and defining of how the UI works with prefabs has to happen or it will remain a bit of a mess that does everything it needs to do “pretty ok” but is locked in its current iteration.
Diving into all of this I think I can better relate to Unity’s position, they’re burned out having pushed this gargantuan prefab system not long ago, and in doing so they’ve made the foundations of their UI much more complex and iterating on it is a pain expanded by prior headaches. The best course of action is to clean up the foundations of how prefabs interact with the UI so creating things in the future have a better chance of working with the various complications of the Prefab system.
I don’t want to undersell how much of a tall order all of this is, for all i know the guys who implemented the prefab system are too burned out on it to ever want to work on it again, or have left out of frustration, that’s just how these thigs go. But some attempt should be made to streamline the system or it’s going to become a key bottleneck of the entirety of the engine moving forward.
You being modest?
I’ve seen your video on prefab variants. You’re one of the few people that not only groks variants, but uses them to their utmost, and cleverly designed your design approach around them. You probably understand them better than anyone at Unity.
Wow, thanks for the praise, april_4_short, didn’t think that video was relevant any more. I put a lot of effort into that vid back in the day. After watching it again the suggestions segment definitely still holds up.
I have the luxury of working with the prefabs at the top level creating content and with my own workflow. What I mean by the guys at Unity knowing them better is they’ve created the entire backend and have worked with countless users and pipelines to ensure things have come together. We don’t know the kinds of road blocks and back end systems they had to toil with to get this system exposed through the core UI while making the old prefab system transition over without any hiccups, and this is the real meat and potatoes that determine how these systems work. I really don’t envy their positions.
My hope is that now that they’ve had some time to get their sanity back, they can come back and really fine tune these UI and prefab systems to a high level of shine and usability.
Last post, made a big discovery with how properties works and I wanted this thread to be complete so final update on this subject of easily generating windows with the properties option.
BIG GAFF ON MY END: Turns out if you have a prefab asset in your scene and you create a property window from that thing sitting there directly in your scene, the property window works without a single problem. This is absolutely the best property window and if all others worked just as this one does there would be no issue. So the problem lies with the 2 other property windows, one having no ability to select and propagate to parent prefabs by generating one out of the project window, and another one being creating the property window from a reference from another component.
It took me a long time to realize this because I really dislike having excess overhead in my work scene, as it quickly clutters up the inspector list, and that becomes a huge headache as I detailed above, so I have scripts that will take a core asset and expose all the core things I will likely want to work on at a given time as references:
You’d be right if you were to say that this is a more of a bug than a suggestion, but at the time of posting I didn’t realize that and at this point I just wanted to fully document the issue since I’ve kind of gone down the rabbit hole and I’m almost at the bottom anyway.
The ease of generating property windows from prefabs in your scene is super powerful and convenient and I would encourage others to use this pipeline as it seems to be far and away the best in terms of clean interface, ease of use, and functionality. My only gripes are that it requires you to fill your scene with prefabs that now clutter your scene, and that if refenced components and game objects simply behaved in the same way, we could have the best of both worlds, and the overall working with property windows would be less “muddy”.
Ok that’s it. Much ado about a little prefab thing, but it does have some pretty far reaching implications if you’re trying to get the absolute most out of your time and really get in there and make your gameplay better by tweaking lots of dials at a given time without bloating your scene.
Will admit some missinfo here as Unity does do a pretty decent job of allowing you to access a fully loaded properties menu, my project specific setups didn’t lead me in this direction.
TLDR: Property windows should be standardized to have the full functionality, ease of use and cleanliness of property windows created from prefabs sitting in the scene, and edge cases really muddy the pipeline.
Just got the newest Unity build and I was really excited to see an “undo history” in the upper right! I don’t know if this thread inspired that in any way, but I’m excited by the prospect of this coming together.
I hope this thread didn’t send you guys on a wild goose chase, but I’m excited for future functionality if in fact this is the path you guys are persuing, getting prefabs streamlined and all that.
And if this was all random chance, maybe you guys can think about incorporating the “recently changed” among prefabs to greatly streamline the process of rapid prototyping.