Prefabs and working with them - need some hints to work better?

Questions & Answers
1

Have a question on a specific aspect of working with prefabs.

I am making a battleship prefab that has the battleship mesh and all the scripts to control battleship movement.

I am making gunturret prefabs which are the various guns that will be on the battleship. The gunturret prefab has meshes and scripts needed for gun control and launching projectiles. I, of course, want to place the gunturret prefabs as children of the battleship prefab.

I find I can’t drop the gunturret prefabs on the battleship prefab in the Project panel.

I have to put the battleship prefab into the scene/hierarchy panel and then I can drop multiple gunturret prefabs as children on it.

Now comes the troubling part. In order to update the original battleship prefab in the project panel I seem to have to drop the scene/hierarchy battleship back into the project panel where it gets renamed because it has the same name as the original. Now I have to delete the original and rename the copy.

This seems very awkward way for me to manage a prefab with children prefabs.

There must be an easier way to handle this that I am missing. Appreciate any advice!

2

You can just drag your updated battleship right on to your old prefab if you wish to overwrite it.

3

After adding the gun turrets to the battleship prefab, you can select the parent, or battleship prefab in the hierarchy and then in the inspector in the upper-right is a button that says apply. Clicking this will automatically update the battleship prefab allowing you to delete it from the hierarchy and just use the regular prefab.