How to preview Prefabs?

With the new nested prefab functionality, when you click on a prefab, it brings up a blank window in the inspector saying on 'Open Prefab'.

How do we go back to the old functionality of being able to preview the prefab in this window?

There are many situations where I just want to click through prefabs and visually compare settings or components - now I need to add another click, to open the prefab - which also goes to another blank scene, so I lose reference of my main scene.

Even if you double click on prefabs, you still have the blank inspector window flashing at you - making it significantly more difficult to compare differences visually.

I think 'Open Prefab' is a good idea, and it is easy to go back to the main scene, but we need to be able to view what is in the prefabs as we did before. From a UI POV this is a regression.

 

Entries in the project view are prefab assets, which is something similar to Unity scenes, which can't be inspected in the project view either. Placing them into a scene gives you prefab instances, which are fully inspectable and editable without entering the prefab stage. I just moved to doing things like mass static flag changes through the scenes. It's not as frictionless as editing top-level things in the old system, but it it does the trick.

For some mass operations, it might also make sense to write a custom editor script - new API is pretty good. This repository had good samples: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UniteLA2018Examples

 

Thanks for the specifificity - but it still doesn't explain why in Unity pre-2018.3 you could preview prefabs right in the inspector, but now you need to open a separate scene. One of the key strengths of Unity is that you can preview and change so many functions whilst looking at the scene of your actual game - critical for designers and artists who need the context of what else is in the scene to guide their decision.

I was on the fence of switching to 2018 - the Post Processing effects are better, CPU lightmapping seems faster and more reliable. and there are some good assets that require it - but it would have required a major fix to scripts and functionality that broke along the way of the upgrade. This regressive change to prefabs has put me back into the 'stay in 2017 LTS' camp, and I'll just have to hope its fixed for my next title :-(

 

If this is important to you, I recommend to submit a bug-report as described in this document:
https://unity3d.com/unity/beta/guide-to-beta-testing#tab-3

I think just hoping that it gets fixed, is most likely not leading to a resolution, where as submitting a bug-report makes Unity Technologies aware of the issue at least.

After you submitted the bug-report, you receive a confirmation email with the bug-report case number. Please post this case number here for Unity staff to pick up.