Instantiating unknown (at compile time) prefabs at runtime

Instantiate() seems to work great if you want to clone an object at runtime, assuming you know WHAT you're cloning. I have a situation where I have a bunch of prefabs and will determine which set of them to use at run time for a match 3 game. Then I need to dynamically generate a bunch of them. Is my only option to do a bunch of if/switch checks to get the correct prefab, or can I use a prefab name/ID to actually Instantiate somehow? I need to make this data driven, not hardcoded...

 

Assuming the prefabs all have unique names a Dictionary should work well for this.

 

While that does help, I have to know all of the potential prefabs ahead of time. If my game introduces a new prefab, I have to change/add code.

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. The only thing that really changes is the art assets, so perhaps I need a way to dynamically load and set that instead of prefabs themselves...

 

You can put your assets on the Resources folder and load them with Resources.Load().

Load ( )'s first argument is the file name you want to load of type String.

If your dynamically generated prefabs return their name, you can use that string to load the correct prefab without having to know before hand which one it is.

Example:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.  
3. var myPrefab : Transform;
4. var fileName : String;
5.  
6. myPrefab = Resources.Load(fileName, Transform);
7.  
8. Instantiate(myPrefab, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
9.  

Every prefab that gets dynamically created can return its name to the fileName, which can either be a String as mentioned above, or an array of Strings (in case you want to instantiate more than one).