public Array of Prefabs and performance

Hello!

I have a public array of prefabs that I am populating via the editor. There are about 100 prefabs in the array. It's one big array where I am storing modules that make up levels. I need to instantiate about 10 of those prefabs per level, but not always in numerical order.

My question is if, by having all prefabs in the scene, in the array, are all of them consuming resources?

Because I have to instantiate each of the prefabs when I need to use them, I'm assuming it does not have a significant impact before that. But I'm not sure, maybe it does consume resources by being on the scene ready to be instantiated?

Would like to know if anyone could shed some light on this.

I can, if necessary, break this single array into a smaller one for each level. But the way things are now, it is very convenient to have them all collected on a single array.

Also, I'm using a SharedInstance to access it for now. I used that to put what I needed together fast, but can change. Open to suggestions.

Some more information, I'm targeting mobile and for some levels instantiate the prefabs during gameplay.

Thanks!

 

I don’t believe they use many resources because the array is just a pointer to them, and they’re not actually doing anything until you instantiate them. I could be wrong though. If you’re worried about performance you could remove the references from the array when you know they’re not being used in the current level. That way they can be garbage collected and free up any memory they were taking up.

Another option is to use the Resources API. That’ll probably be easier in the long run https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Resources.Load.html

 

Thank you for the response @MartinTilo , that makes sense. Thanks for the memory profiler recommendation, I will take a look at it, haven't use it before, looks useful!

 

@MartinTilo does that mean everything in the Resources folder will be loaded into memory in every scene?