Resolved Hierarchy Folders

Are you planning to add hierarchy folders? I know there's a roadmap for it but it's hard to tell sometimes if it's actively being considered.

https://portal.productboard.com/ca1chnbwvzw1eg5yjc5rijnj/c/392-hierarchy-folders

I would really like this feature as a way of improving Unity performance without sacrificing hierarchy organization. I've been using a unity package for it which has a very clean implementation: any gameobject that is a folder can't have other components, its transform is locked at world origin and when your game runs or builds it will remove all folders.

https://github.com/xsduan/unity-hierarchy-folders

But I can imagine Unity can do some under the hood stuff to make this even better. All you'd need is a bit of metadata in a gameobject to say if its part of a folder, and if so you display a folder in the hierarchy. It would be purely a UI thing and everything would run nicely both in the editor and at runtime.

For how easy it is to implement this, and since only root transforms can take advantage of multithreadedness, it's honestly a shame we don't have this feature already.

 

Oh I second this one. Editor only folder inside hierachy is really needed.
For years too many user use empty game object on the scene as folder to clean the Hierarchy. Leading to the results sometimes we even need to flatten(Delete) out those folder object before building the app. which is time consuming.

 

Since there is third party plugins that solve this problem, without having access to any Unity internals, might it be that you're looking at it from the wrong angle? The unity-hierarchy-folders plugin that @CaseyHofland linked didn't have to solve any dependencies!

Which features is it you want to add to the hierarchy folders that it's impossible to add right now?

 

The product board has now been updated from "hierarchy folders" to "hierarchy performance and organization"

https://portal.productboard.com/ca1.../c/392-hierarchy-performance-and-organization

I'm curious to the motivation behind this. The community has been asking for hierarchy folders - I guess I haven't seen any other suggestions for hierarchy organization so I'm curious what else this entails.

Regarding those, are there any implementation details yet? In my mind, all you'd need is have the YAML serializer support hierarchy names (so folder "Foo" with GameObject "Bar" becomes "Foo/Bar" for the serializer) and have it display as a purely UI thing in-editor. Result: GameObjects that are part of the root, but collapsible in the hierarchy.

 

Glad there's being so much thought put into it, I had no idea there were so many strings to it (in my defense, folders seem trivial from a users perspective).

One problem I'm having with the github package is Prefabs with a folder at the root: since folders delete themselves, it would turn 1 prefab into x game objects, which is obviously impossible.

One solution I would like to propose is that prefab instances (existing in the scene) delete the folders, but prefabs themselves turn the folder into a normal transform. We use prefabs with folders as these kind of "packs" (e.g. the Player Pack contains the player prefab, the camera prefab and a cinemachine freelook prefab). I'd imagine open world games would like to use it for recurring geometry too, where the folder-problem becomes more significant.

 

As I call them, Prefab Packs. 1 prefab that packs a bunch of different objects but otherwise does nothing else: just like a folder. I'm not a fan of singletons (put mildly), but where I have seen them used there's always that 1 prefab in every scene hosting them.

This of course expands to stuff like recurring structures or room layouts, however feng shui they may be. These just pack into prefabs so neatly. Then again, in 98% of games these will likely end up as static geometry anyway, so fair's fair: this feature is kind of nitpicking.

Thanks for responding so quickly and transparently, I really appreciate it!