Best practices for using similar GUI in every scene

I have multiple scenes. and each scene has a similar GUI however some icons differ between scenes.
for example: here is my USA scene


here is my CO scene


to achieve the CO scene I dragged the entire canvas from the USA scene into the project view as a prefab, and then loaded the CO scene, copied the prefab onto the hierarchy, and then modified it for the CO scene.


is this good practice?

Should i instead create one generic Canavas prefab that is similar in all scenes and instanciate it on awake and then load other prefabs for different GUI objects in each scene?

 

In 5.3 the recommended way is not using DontDestroyOnLoad but instead using the new multi scene support.

ie. You have a scene for your UI and other scenes are loaded or unloaded as normal, with your main UI and setup scene always present at the root.

If you don't want to use 5.3 multi scene editing, or don't have patience to wait for it, you can use http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Object.DontDestroyOnLoad.html - but make sure this object is only ever loaded one time.

 

Or, use prefabs, as you originally suggested. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

 

Yeah do that, because then if you want to change the prefab later on it will automatically update, if you dont you might end up with assets that have different data in each scene, get out of sync etc.

 

This is the first I've heard of that, and I can't wait for it. I have code that specifically forces an object to be a cross-scene object. Being able to cut that won't remove a lot of code, but every little bit that I have to manage is more that I...well, have to manage. TL;DR - I looooove cutting code!

It puts the lotion on its constructor...