Prefab Evolution Plugin(nested prefabs)

Here is the solution.

PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PECache.cs(Line 187)

Code (CSharp):

1. static string getMetaUserData(string meta)
2. {
3.     ...
4.     //var length = indexOfEOL - 1 - start;       //original line
5.     var length = indexOfEOL - start;            //fixed line
6.     ...
7. }

PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PECache.cs(Line 202)

Code (CSharp):

1. static void setContainsNestedInstances(string guid, bool state)
2. {
3.     ...
4.     //original lines
5.     //if (data != string.Empty && data != HaveConst && data != DontHaveConst)
6.     //    return;
7.     //var newData = state ? HaveConst : DontHaveConst;
8.  
9.     //fixed lines
10.     var newData = state ? HaveConst : DontHaveConst;
11.     if( data == newData ) { return; }
12.     ...
13. }

This fix the problems of
1. PrefabEvolution save the "HaveNested_false" string but read it to "HaveNested_fals"
2. PrefabEvolution generate *.prefab.meta file everytime in situation requiring no changes.
3. Checking unnecessary prefabs while saving.

@SoulGameStudio
I am using PE for avoiding simultaneous scene editing between many co-workers.
I also hope "Long Live the PrefabEvolution"

 

@netics : thanks for sharing!

Now I'll just hope PE won't break apart my entire project

 

I'm curious what this tool does in the project at runtime. The PEPrefabScript component looks like it gets created at runtime, but doesn't do anything outside of the editor. Is that true? Could that script be marked with HideFlag.DontSaveInBuild?

 

PE is editor-time tool. No runtime activity. No runtime burden.

 

What happens to the PEPrefabScript component then? What prevents that from getting created at runtime?

 

Hi all,

I am having some issues with this plugin. At some point, when I change the position/rotation of one of my prefabs, those changes are propagated to all instances of that prefab. so all are moved to the same postion/rotation.

I don't know what I made or how I can fix that.
Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.
Nacho.

 

We are having a similiar issue.. When I change the rotation of the childs, then make changes of the parent and apply it, my childs are back to the parent rotation..

Any help?

 

I have a crash, it reproduces 100%.

Case:
PrefabA is a parent of a PrefabB
I have instance of PrefabA and instance of PrefabB in 1 scene.
Root object of PrefabA has children objects (saved in the PrefabA).

Just need to delete 1 of children object in the instance of PrefabA then press Apply - Unity crashes always.

 

I'm getting a StackOverFlowException every time scripts reload.

PEPrefabScriptExt constructor is calling it at

Code (CSharp):

1.   PEPrefabScript.EditorBridge.GetAssetByGuid = (guid) => AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(AssetDatabase.GUIDToAssetPath(guid), typeof(GameObject)) as GameObject;
2.  

Seems as is .Prefab is calling this delegate and it's stack overflowing. This issue is fixed be restarting Unity but comes back in a few minutes.
Honestly need help from the dev ASAP.

 

Hm.... the case is little bit deeper. When I removed links on the removable object it became works. I had a link on the object in a button in UnityAction.

 

To everybody who owns this asset.

I am going to do something and I hope you follow along.

This asset appears abandoned. I am going to give the asset one star and in the review I am going to put "Developer has abandoned this asset."

If everybody does this one of two things will happen. 1) The developer will suddenly appear. or 2) We will collectively stop people from buying a dead asset.

Also vote up my review as helpful so it gets to the top and replaces the old reviews.

 

We get the same thing; there are a few prefabs that trigger it 100% of the time. The plugin just isn't usable on those prefabs any more. I've tried to debug the problem but really can't figure it out. Searching for the error message doesn't yield anything interesting; it's an internal Unity problem which is exposed in a number of situations, not just with PrefabEvolution.

Just so Google can find this post, the error is "The file 'MemoryStream' is corrupted! Remove it and launch unity again [Position is out of bounds!]"

 

Is there a way to disable the whole prefab evolution from checking every time something changes. For example when i save my project, it seems to recheck things even thought it had done everything before. On small project maybe this isn't a problem, but my project is bigger, so its rather annoying. Hopefully this isnt by design before it may corrupt prefabs if the checking was disabled.

 

Hi. Sorry guys. Last year was really hard for me and i just have no time to work on this plugin. But now i'm ok and ready to fix all you problems. It's will be realy helpfull if you can prepare sample projects where i can reproduce bugs. Also Unity crash logs will be helpfull. So if you have a problems you can shot me a mail prefabevolution@gmail.com and i fix your problems as soon as possible.

 

Sounds wonderful! Ok, I have 1 stable Unity crash in Prefab Evolution. I will make for you sample project later. It's very disgusting bug. Hope you will fix it soon. Cheers!

 

Thanks for your bugreport. Also if somebody have a same problem (Apply throws "The file 'MemoryStream' is corrupted!"), check that your child prefabs are created after you add a RectTransform to parent prefabs(or add RectTransform to child manualy). Thanks again and feel free to send me a bugreports and feature requests.

 

Can send me a Editor log or sample pjoject where this bug apear.

 

I can't give a sample project where the bug appears as it only appears in my project which is a large game.

Here is the editor log:
StackOverflowException
PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScriptExt.<PEPrefabScriptExt>m__122 (System.String guid) (at Assets/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PEPrefabScriptExt.cs:16)
PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScript.get_Prefab () (at Assets/PrefabEvolution/Sources/PEPrefabScript.cs:43)
PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScriptExt+<OnValidate>c__AnonStorey5F.<>m__123 () (at Assets/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PEPrefabScriptExt.cs:27)

Happy to add debug logs or something to help debug it. Thanks!

 

I feel sure this question must have been asked elsewhere, but have not been able to find it. So apologies in advance for probable repetition...

A situation that occurs frequently is that a nested prefab is modified in place, with the changes stored in the parent prefab -- when what was intended was that the nested prefab be modified and those changes propagated to other instances. I was hoping to find a button or menu option "Apply Changes to Child Prefab" (or something like that.) No luck, of course, so is there a way to do this that I'm missing?

 

New version has been sent to Asset Store approve and will be available soon. If you need it right now just mail me to prefabevolution@gmail.com

 

Hi there!
We are are social and mobile game dev company Crazy Panda Games.
We've bought your asset around 5 months ago and have couple questions.
We use NGUI as primary UI asset. Our currently developed game is really HUGE on UI (Mobile MMO RTS).
We have an already proven production pipeline and we'd love to fit your asset in it.

1) Lead UI Technical Designer creates BaseSpecialOfferBanner.prefab and allows it to be nested.
2) Lead guy sets up all needed values, default sprites, scripts etc for that prefab.
3) Other guy, Junior UI Technical Designer, need to create 12 regional + content variations of that prefab.
4) Junior guy creates 12 empty prefabs and allows'em to be nested.
5) Junior guy instantiates BaseSpecialOfferBanner.prefab to each of 12 variations and hit apply on each. Now when he will make changes - this changes will be recorded to "wrapper" prefab. He sest LocalizationID strings, Sets UISprite ids etc.. (all that stuff is serializable)
4) Lead UI Technical Designer modifies BaseSpecialOfferBanner.prefab and somehow changes the localization id field of one text label.
5) PrefabEvolution applies changes and overwrites modified localization id strings.

We found a solution:
1) Roll back all changes (git)
2) Open each of 12 variations and set this particular localization ID field to "keep" in Evolve Prefa script in each variation.

Question:
Is there any way to set "keep/ignore/default" in BaseSpecialOfferBanner itself? So when Junior guys would use them they don't not have to worry about setting "keep/ignore" flags for tonns of elements each time?

We see pipeline like this:
1) Click on "green" boxed prefab in herarchy view (which means it can be applied)
2) Expand EvolvePrefab component.
3) Because it's "green" prefab (first level) we see a full list of all serialized properties with flags.
4) Mark properties you want to be ignored/keeped
5) Click "Apply Only Rules" button.

Also this features whould be nice to have:
1) Apply only specific propery to all instances (with/whithout overriding rules)
Believe us this is very common issue on a big project with tonns of prefabs and their instances.

2) Apply changes to prefab but do not apply changes to instances.
When you work in a team you have 5 people working with different prefabs and each of them contains for example BasicBlueButton.prefab. When lead UI changes button prefab - there is no way to merge changes later.

Thank you.

 

Hi there

Can you take a look at the bug where resaving the scene causes PF to regenerate every meta tag with 'timeCreated'? It was working for a brief while a few versions back but then started generating the timecreated tags again. Netics posted a fix above that seems to work - I say seems because when I added that change in some of my child prefabs stopped updating, but perhaps it was unrelated.

 

This is driving us crazy as well, so a fix would be much appreciated

 

Currently I don't think there's a way to apply changes to prefabs that are nested, except by modifying them outside of where they're nested.

If the icon is yellow, applying changes to that prefab will just store them locally in whatever prefab it's nested in.

If the icon is green, applying changes will store it at the prefab level and propagate it out to all nested instances.

So, in those cases where you want changes to propagate to your nested instances (where icons are yellow), you need to drag in a new instance of the prefab (icon is green), hit apply, and it will propagate out to everywhere that prefab is nested.

This is a little backwards, but I'm not sure there's a better way for the plugin author to handle this. This may be more of a usability problem than a technical one.

 

There is a fix. Search my reply.

 

@PrefabEvolution mentioning you i case you have not seen notificaton, please check your mail

 

It has come to the conclusion that the checking prefab dependency check has become unbearably too much / slow so I want to uninstall PE. BUT.! How do we do that???

 

Thanks for the reply! ...I was afraid that would be the answer. I do think there must be a reasonable solution to this problem. The EvolvePrefab component could offer the option to apply its array of Modifications to the child prefab -- given the Modifications array is already tracking deltas based on the child prefab, there shouldn't be any version sync issues to deal with...? Anyway, I'd like to request that feature, please.

 

I'll try it again, but I'd rather have an official fix, since I don't fully understand what those fields are being used for. Granted, it does look like you're fixing a logic error and a typo. Still, I'd like to see what Andrew says. @PrefabEvolution

That's not a bad idea. I'd support this feature. I typically don't go to the EvolvePrefab component unless I'm trying to figure out what's modified.

 

Something that I am finding: this can be excruciatingly slow (half a minute or even minutes of waiting, at times) when you have a few thousand prefabs.

The good thing is, I think it's checking what prefabs have other prefabs nested IN them, if I'm not mistaken. I have prefabs I'd love to nest IN other things in all sorts of locations, but the prefabs that contain said nestable prefabs are all located in one smaller location (and number in the dozens, not thousands).

Adding a couple of things would make me super happy:
1. A way to cache all this data in general so it's not having to recalculate so much.
2. A way to definitively not check "does this have nested prefabs in it?" except in certain paths.

I think I got #2 worked out for my own build, fingers crossed, but in general this is an issue.

 

Hi
I am using your asset in my project, and that looks really awesome, but there is one issue (or may be I misunderstood how to use it correctly):
1) create object
2) add it to prefabs ("current")
3) put it as a child to nested prefab
4) make current prefab nested as well
5) Apply parent prefab (in the scene)
6) make some modification in current prefab - the changes doesn't applies to prefab in the project folder

Is it and issue? If not, why that doesn't save changes?

 

My biggest mistake of using this plugin is I didn't not check how difficult it would be to disable the plugin and uninstall what it has done to my assets. Now even if I delete the plugin, there would be all these "missing script" PE scripts attached all over my assets.

No clean uninstall method for this plugin. I have warned everyone!

 

You can use something like References Finder to find all the assets that have it, at least. Still not clean, but better than doing it by hand!

Wow. By references finder, I meant Find Pro, which is currently deprecated apparently: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/45693

Asset Usage Finder may help in a pinch, but at the moment I have serious reservations as I noted in my review there: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/59997

 

The author is aware of the issue and will have it back up at some point soon, possibly under the new name "Finders." Definitely weird, as it was recently featured on Level 11.

This is the weird workflow we've discussed in this thread, I think. If the prefab that's nested has a yellow icon next to it, changes you make to it there will not apply to its source prefab in the project folder.

Our workflow for updating nested prefabs involves editing them in a standalone scene.

I'm planning to work on a custom editor for this for our project; if that goes well I'll ask Andrew about sharing it here.

 

@netics: Thanks for your fix, it helps a lot. I still see Unity saving all nested prefabs and their meta files (so they get checked out in Perforce), but Revert Unchanged reverts them, so no changes to the contents actually took place.

I wonder whether there's a way to make them not get checked out at all in these cases. I haven't looked at how the Perforce integration works yet.

 

I've identified one cause of more meta file changes - when I play my scene, PrefabEvolution calls "BuildLinks" on a whole bunch of things, and explicitly marks some objects as modified. I've added dirtiness checking to the relevant functions, so they return whether they modified anything, so that it doesn't have to blindly mark the objects as dirty. Hopefully this will fix the problem.

The patch is a little more extensive than the one @netics already posted (which is still necessary, to fix other issues) but I can try to post it if there's interest.

 

We were literally just discussing this problem, so we'd very much appreciate if you shared your fix.

 

I want the patch you made too!

 

PE seems to be broken in my project, I keep getting this error:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScriptExt.BuildLinks (PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScript _this, Boolean force) (at Assets/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PEPrefabScriptExt.cs:257)
PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScriptExt+<OnValidate>c__AnonStorey1C.<>m__44 () (at Assets/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PEPrefabScriptExt.cs:30)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication.Internal_CallDelayFunctions () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:227)

Could I get some help please?

 

I can see lot of PE errors when I run build from command line (Version: 1.3.9.6 (May 19, 2016)).

Code (CSharp):

1. NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2.       at PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScript.get_ParentPrefab () [0x00000] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/PEPrefabScript.cs:30
3.       at PrefabEvolution.PEExposedProperties.GetInheritedProperties () [0x0002e] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/PEExposedProperties.cs:53
4.       at PrefabEvolution.PEExposedProperties.get_Items () [0x00000] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/PEExposedProperties.cs:150
5.       at PrefabEvolution.PEExposedProperties.get_OrderedItems () [0x00008] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/PEExposedProperties.cs:159
6.       at PrefabEvolution.PEExposedPropertiesEditor.Build (Boolean setDirty) [0x0003d] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PropertyExposure/PEExposedPropertiesEditor.cs:74
7.       at PrefabEvolution.PEExposedPropertiesEditor.Build () [0x00000] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PropertyExposure/PEExposedPropertiesEditor.cs:62
8.       at PrefabEvolution.PEExposedPropertiesEditor..ctor (PrefabEvolution.PEPrefabScript[] targets) [0x0002a] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PropertyExposure/PEExposedPropertiesEditor.cs:49
9.       at PrefabEvolution.PEGameObjectInspectorOverride.OnEnable () [0x00066] in /Users/builder/bamboo-agent-home/xml-data/build-dir/AF-QVI1-JOB1/GF/Assets/Scripts/ThirdParty/PrefabEvolution/Sources/Editor/PEGameObjectInspectorOverride.cs:21
10.     UnityEditor.Editor:CreateEditor(Object[], Type)
11.     UnityEditor.Editor:CreateEditor(Object, Type) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorBindings.gen.cs:83)
12.     UnityEditor.Editor:CreateEditor(Object) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorBindings.gen.cs:78)
13.     UnityEditor.AssetPreviewUpdater:CreatePreviewForAsset(Object, Object[], String) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/AssetPreviewUpdater.cs:28)
14.     UnityEditor.AssetDatabase:Refresh(ImportAssetOptions)
15.     UnityEditor.AssetDatabase:Refresh() (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/AssetDatabaseBindings.gen.cs:244)

 

@PrefabEvolution ,

A couple of questions about this asset before buying:

1. Most recent reviews are 1stars (although most are much higher) because of lack of support / bugs? You fixing this?

2. To what extent can it be accessed from and integrated with Playmaker?

3. Could I use nested prefabs to store in effect complex data like stats, items and inventories etc?

 

Hi, I've been using PE for a long time now, and pretty happy with it. There are some rough edges, and a good understanding of how prefabs works internally is required, but that is more Unity's fault than PE.

I've just been using Unity's new MemoryProfiler (https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/memoryprofiler) on a release build of my game on my iOS device, and encountered the following:

PE is using 5MB of memory at runtime, is there anything I can about this?

 

This is really interesting, because author told, that PE do nothing at runtime. I sometimes see PE in profiler at runtime too.

Can you please comment it?

 

Looking through the source code, I found code that was #ifdef'ed with PE_STRIP which somewhat mitigated this, at the cost of having to restart Unity after a build to restore PE's internal state.

Could you comment on whether PE_STRIP is safe to use?

 

Would really welcome people's views re my 3 questions in my recent posts above ... ?

 

Duffer123:

1) Basic functionality is working well and has been for me for a while. Only real problem I ran into was PE making a change to all prefab meta files every time, which was annoying with source control, but netics has provided a solution for that at the top of this page that works well. I've just found an issue where PE related stuff seems to take up memory in the release build, and waiting for a response on that.

2) PE is a tool to manage prefabs in the editor. It's not really related to Playmaker in any way.

3) The things you mentioned seem better suited to configuration files or ScriptableObjects, especially as they might need to change at runtime. PE is more suited to things like level design. Say you have an enemy prefab, and you place a few of these inside a level prefab. You then save the level prefab. Normally in unity if you then make a change to the enemy prefab, the enemies already saved in the level prefab won't update. Using PE you can retroactively update all instances of an enemy prefab inside that level prefab in one go.

PE has been one of the first packages I've imported into any new project I've started, and has served me well, but I'm really starting to think about alternative solutions now as it requires a good understanding of how prefabs work from everybody working on the project, and that has been my main source of problems with it.

 

@WillemKokke , thanks for the quick response. Useful.

 

@PrefabEvolution Do you see any chance to release an update targeting the "Change all meta files" problem?

 

Need to be careful with the first fix with regards to line length, needs to check whether the line ends with \n or \r. I was getting a mixture so for some userData your fix would work and others not.

 

Just my tuppence worth, its a shame PE isn't supported more actively, its a pretty good solution. I worked on a very large scale project with another nested prefab solution (a run-time solution, yikes) and it was hell. PE on the whole has been pretty good, proof of the pudding being art and design peeps being able to get to grips with it and comfortable using it.