Request for a new editor callback (PostProcessPrefab)

Not entirely related to the new prefab workflows but still this would be super useful:

Right now, the editor exposes a PostProcessScene attribute that i can use to receive a callback when a scene is processed; we are using this to perform build-time modifications to scenes (e.g: stripping certain objects, adding debug stuff, etc).

In the past, i asked for the matching PostProcessPrefab attribute, since we'd like to perform the same "patching" at build time for prefabs as well (but to not persist this back to the project).

I think i was told back then that this is probably not possible due to technical reasons (no way to roll back changes after the build?)

Is this something that may be possible now with the new prefab system in place? i believe it can be super useful for other developers as well!

 

Since prefabs are now an imported asset, couldn't this be done with OnPostprocessAllAssets?

I'd love there to be a PostProcessPrefab, as OnPostprocessAllAssets seems to be really slow, but it should at least work.

 

I want this to run during builds so that I can "patch" certain prefabs but leave them unchanged in my project.

 

Oh, I understand now. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, it would be a very nice feature.

 

I ended up moving some work to scriptable objects for the patching you describe, then referencing that. I'm not sure if applicable, but could be an idea in the meantime.

 

This would make an interesting workaround for async loading of prefabs, too... I think. Could put this on each massive prefab, and wait until they're all received before assuming all prefabs have been loaded and setup.

Not efficient, would still bog the main thread, but at least it'd be possible to treat huge prefabs as scenes and know when they're ready.

 

Could u elaborate a bit on how your solution works?

 

- https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Build.IPreprocessBuild.OnPreprocessBuild.html
- load all prefabs with

AssetDatabase.Find("t:Prefab");

- ???
- profit!

 

We have custom build code for building asset bundles for our projects.
Some of this process involves making "modifications" to prefabs and scenes as they are built.

For scenes, we can use the PostProcessScene callback - it will be fired when building the scene, but i guess it is done on a copy of the real scene asset file, so any changes i make will not be saved to my project.

For prefabs, we don't have that option, so what our build code does is create copies of prefabs and modify them. After the build completes it will "clean up" and make sure everything returns to the state it was before the build.

It could be a lot easier to achieve this if i had a PostProcessPrefab callback that allowed me to process a prefab just as it gets built, but those changes won't get saved to the project.

 

Do you have any comments on how this can be supported @SteenLund ?

 

I would also really be interested in this feature, there's no way to remove any components from prefabs in build only at this stage in Unity I believe.

 

We'd love this feature too. We are using the PostProcessScene to remove unneeded components from objects in the scene, but would love to be able to do this to our prefabs too at build time, so we can strip unneeded components but leave them untouched in the project.

 

Bump.
This would be a really great feature for optimizing some stuff for the build.

 

I would also like this feature. I assume it doesn't exist as there may be many thousands of prefabs in a game and this could slow down builds quite a bit.

 

This would be really useful. It would even be ok if we could post process the 'flattened' prefabs. ie Dont worry about nested prefabs/inheritance/etc, which is what I imagine introduces most of the complexity.

Flatten everything in scenes, post process scenes. (PostProcessScene). Then flatten all prefabs, process those flattened prefabs (PostProcessPrefab).

A 'quirk' here is that if SomePrefab is in SomeScene, your post process changes to SomePrefab wont appear in SomeScene, since SomeScene was flattened and all prefab information was lost. I think this is fine,

We have our own hooks to perform some cleanup/etc at build time for scripts in scene. OnPostProcessScene we do something like "Find all <IBakeable> components in scene, call Bake on those components". We would just run the same logic in OnPostProcessPrefab. (GetComponentsInChildren<IBakeable> and call Bake on each".

Thoughts, @SteenLund ?

 

We do a lot of edits to the game while building; I just revert them all in the source control after build is done.

 

Seems a bit painful.

 

Right now it's just the scene files, so I don't mind, but I guess I could commit the changes by mistake if I'm not careful. I didn't know about the OnPostProcessScene, I'm gonna try it to see if it work with our pipeline.

 

What Unity actually does when it builds a project or you enter play mode is *copy* the entire scene. So the preprocessor or processor lets you work on the *copied* scene, you aren't actually working on the safely stored scene.

So you can go mad and nuke half of it in code, and it'll be fine...

That's the right way to do this stuff.

 

I actually needed this feature the other day. We remove some components at build time. But using the PostProcessScene only removes them from instances in scenes. They stil exist on prefabs.

We do only use these prefabs for static scene objects so it works because we dont instance them in runtime. But still. Would have been more robust to remove them from prefabs too

 

+1, this would be extremely useful.

 

+1

 

Havent had the opportunity to test it. But if it lets me alter prefabs and revert them after build it sure fixes my requirements

 

Allright, then the answer to @Mads-Nyholm is that it does not help in this case.

edit: We want to remove design time stuff at build. Here is good example, https://github.com/microsoft/ProjectAcoustics/issues/33

 

Yeah, this is it. We basically have this for scenes, but not for anything else. It is immensely useful for scenes. A staging area feature would be amazing.

 

+1 for an asset staging area during builds - would give me exactly what we need!

 

+1

 

+1

Especially if it could allow reserializing scripted objects with different serialization layouts because of #if UNITY_EDITOR around fields.

 

+1 for stripping out things in headless server builds

 

+1

Yeah. Please add this, it is needed.

This would be extremely needed also

 

+1

 

+1

 

+1