Quality of Life Feature Request

Hi,
I'm new to Unity, but one thing I thought would be very useful is to copy multiple fields of an object while in Play mode, and then paste those fields back in edit mode, on the original fields.

Currently, I can only cut and paste one field and it will paste wherever I paste it.

What would be better is, let's say in play mode to modify an objects Position and Scale. I want to right click on Positon->Copy and then right click on Scale->copy. Now both values are in the clipboard.

I go back into Edit mode and then in the inspector, I right click on Scale->Paste. This pastes the Scale values.
I then right click on Position->Paste. This pastes the position values.

Thanks

 

One way you can SORT of get this, to a limited degree, is during the run, press PAUSE, then drag the hierarchy you care about into the project area, which will make a spontaneous prefab.

Once you stop running, you now have that prefab as a frozen "snapshot" of your runtime values, and you can load it alongside other assets and copy / paste / replace stuff at your leisure.

 

Ok, thanks. But cherry picking values and pasting them over should be a pretty simple implementation so maybe a dev catches this post one day.

 

Short of just making a "deep multi-object clipboard" I can't even imagine what the UI for this feature would look like.

Let's say you have 7 positions and 4 scales to click and paste. So you go through the paused running scene and hoover those 7 positions up, copy, copy, copy.

Then you stop the editor and get to the prefab or scene and start pasting all 7 positions back along with all 4 scales... How do you ensure you keep them all straight? Names? What about dupe names? Position in hierarchy? What if things move or change at runtime?

 

It's pretty simple. Every property has a name. No UI changes for this feature needed.
Let's say I Copy 7 different properties. Whenever I paste over top a property that I already copied from (it's in the clipboard), just use that stored copy by its name (if I copied position and I paste over a position property, then paste the position property not the scale property etc). If I past a value on a different field, then just take the last copied property like it is now.

 

You could make an editor script that iterates and hoovers up all the items at runtime (while paused), writes them to a JSON file, perhaps indexed by their full hierarchy name.

Then at edit-time read in the JSON and inject it throughout the scene. You could make it graphical so that you select/deselect only the fields (or names) you want to copy (like checkboxes).

 

Good idea - you might also be able to persist data from Play Mode->Edit Mode using EditorPrefs (with a string from JsonUtility.ToJson example). I haven't personally tried setting EditorPrefs during play mode but I imagine it should work ?

 

You can copy and paste component values (in play mode or edit mode) using the dotted menu: