"Use separate prefabs for specialisation; do not specialise instances."

Unity Engine
1

I’m curious what you all think about tip #17 here:
[ 50 Tips for Working with Unity (Best Practices) – Dev.Mag](http:// 50 Tips for Working with Unity (Best Practices) – Dev.Mag)

I have a situation where I’m considering having multiple prefabs that only differ in their properties. I currently have a single “jump gate” prefab which has a drop-down that controls where the player travels to when it’s activated.

For various reasons, I’m considering dumping the data from certain types of scenes into a file, and instantiating what I need after a “background” scene loads. (I currently load a separate scene in with LoadLevelAdditive) I could save off the property data into the file and set the property after my one jump gate prefab is instantiated. Or I could do like this tip says and create separate prefabs for each specific jump gate, which would be easier, but seems weird.

So I’m wondering in general what the pros and cons of this tip are. Creating separate prefabs that only differ in their properties is counter to my normal way of thinking, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

2

i think what in the article is aiming for is consistency of prefabs across game world…+ saving time…

imagine 2 versions of street lights in a city, one with dim light, the other one with bright light…

if you have single prefab that you reuse in the world and editing it’s properties, it will be a hard to edit each single one again if you decided to alter their values a little…

but if those 2 types each linked to its own corresponding prefab in your game prefabs collection…
you will only really care editing source prefab and it will be applied to all in the game… saving a lot of time + consistency

3

Ah, that makes sense.