Show Prefab Overrides

Unity Engine
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1

Hi there,

Regarding showing that a prefab has overrides, is a great addition! But I think the transform overrides should be ignored. Having everything highlighted as having transform overrides is as useful as showing nothing.
In my opinion, transforms should not be taken into consideration as overrides at all (maybe I don’t see the bigger picture). I hope you see my point.

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Cheers!

13 Likes
2

I can see your point. This would be especially annoying when working with UI prefabs, as their values are constantly changing

1 Like
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Hi BOXOPHOBIC,

Can you please tell us what operations you made to arrive at the state your screenshot shows? Was it by manually changing the scale of your objects or did the Hierarchy indicators appear after an import or upgrade?

This Hierarchy feature is meant to indicate non-default overrides and basically headline the blue verticals which would be shown in the Inspector. Position and rotation are considered default overrides but Unity has never treated scale as a default override. The Inspector therefore marks scale overrides with the blue vertical line.

Here’s how the Unity documentation describes default overrides: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/PrefabUtility.IsDefaultOverride.html

1 Like
4

Hi there. Thanks for getting back. The prefabs are indeed scaled and the indicator works as expected.
This is not the issue, what I don’t understand, is why the scale is treated as an override in general. As I stated, maybe I don’t see the bigger picture. In a regular scene, you might have all prefabs scaled.

I actually show a warning in one of my scripts if a prefab has overrides, and I was intrigued to find out that IsDefaultOverride doesn’t take scale into account :smile:

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Kind regards

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5

Just a small addition. I know that scale is a special case:

  • If a prefab A has a scale override, it will not take the scale of prefab B if you apply the override
  • If prefab A doesn’t have the scale override, it will take the prefab B scale if that is changed
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IMO scale should be kept as prefab override as I use it for a lot of model prefabs, so it’s pretty useful to update the base variant’s scale and have that update trickle down to child variants and scene instances.

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Do note that for UI prefabs (i.e. RectTransform), most of the properties that dictate position and sizing are default overrides:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/PrefabUtility.IsDefaultOverride.html

However, pure Scale in the RectTransform is also not default like it’s not in regular Transform, since it has a different meaning than Size and is used very rarely to control the size of UI elements (and in fact it’s silly to do it that way, should be mostly used as a multiplier to create small feedback tweens).

Now whether scale should be a default override in general, that is a matter of discussion and I’ll let you continue on it :smile:

1 Like
8

I can clearly remember that discussion happening during the development process for nested prefabs, and both things being tried. There was a bunch of community feedback. Can’t remember if that thread happened in the prefab forum or in a beta forum, though.

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It is indeed a bigger topic and totally unrelated to the hierarchy indicator. But still, having everything highlighted there is quite useless for art prefabs but useful for other gameplay-related prefabs…

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Here’s a thread from 2018 discussing the idea of scale as a default override in the context of an experimental build which had the behavior. The idea was eventually dropped due to user feedback: