Prefabs : Build time vs Run time implications

Hi,

Let's imagine I have a Prefab that corresponds to a GameObject with many components, children, something really complex.

I can access and use it via scripting in two ways:
1 - Through a class instance member variable reference that can be set on the Editor (Early binding)
2 - Through Resources.Load (Late binding)

I know that the second option implies a disk read to load the prefab itself, and that prefab is just a file, and doesn't take any ram memory before I call Resources.Load.

But I am somewhat intrigued with the first option. Where and how is the prefab stored if it is only used through early binding. If my scene has a reference to 20 prefabs, even if it doesn't use them, all those referenced prefabs are essentially loaded in memory when the scene loads right?

Let me give a concrete example. Imagine I have a game with many levels and each level is a prefab.
In the Selection Level scene, there are two ways to know what levels are available:
1 - List<LevelPrefab> that is filled in the editor with the references to the level prefabs (Early binding)
2 - Iterate through all of the files in the resources folder to know what levels are available

If a level prefab takes 5mb of ram on average, then, in the first option, it was guaranteed that, when the scene has entered, I would have at least X (number of levels) * 5mb ram usage. Am I thinking correctly here?

 

Ok, I am now sure that the asset references are loaded when the object that references them is loaded.

This Unite presentation reflects on this problem and presents a solution based on a custom inspector for dealing with Resources paths as if they were asset references:

@ 30:32