Prefab names turn black on play?

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,

This seems like a basic question, but google gave me no relevant results.

On pressing play, all prefabs names in the hierarchy turn from blue to black. I assume this means it’s no longer considered a prefab, and will lose performance-related gains from it being a prefab?

I create a pile of barrels, and made it a prefab, which I want to reuse in places. When I clone it, the drawcall count increases quite a lot which is weird since it’s stacked copies of the same single barrel prefab, so I would have expected it to batch them, just like my floor tiles are batched. I thought maybe the fact that everything no longer appears to be a prefab when I hit play in my game, was a sign of why this may be?

// EDIT
It just occurred to me that when I imported my barrel mesh, it was a little on the small side, so I increased my scape factor slightly. Perhaps this is causing it to break the batching process above?

Thanks for any advice.

Mat

2

The problem is that dynamic batching is only working for very low vertex objects < 300 ver.
Static batching is only working for Static objects set to static in the editor.

Prefab is not giving any performance gain. Its just a useful too to handle better with a lot of copies of an object in the editor.
The Prefab information does not exist at runtime

If your barrels will never move, you just can set them static (for batching) in the editor and and all the static barrels will be batched together.

3

Thanks for your response.

I have only 256 verts on my barrel mesh. There’s several barrels in the prefab however. I take it this isn’t why it’s failing to batch them? The prefab’s total vertex count would be several times 256 vertices.

The barrels will never move, but I am using Unity Free, so I don’t believe I have access to static batching?

I have lights in my scene that are not yet baked out. Could this be why the barrels are not batched if they are within range of these lights? I have tested this by making sure the light’s gizmo does not encompass my barrels, but I don’t know if this is an accurate way to test this.

Thanks

Mat

4

AFAIK, prefabs always turn non-linked when you’re playing; it doesn’t have to do with batching. However, it’s true that scaling an object will break batching.