BlackBox - Prefab encapsulation, control Overrides

With all the options that Unity's Prefab system offers, even for an expert user it can be easy to make modifications by mistake on a Prefab instance and leave them as overrides in the scene, something that can become a source of bugs that are pretty hard to track down.

With BlackBox it's possible to prevent overrides to any Prefab by just adding one component. This is something often referred to as "turning a Prefab into a black box", or "encapsulating", "collapsing" or "locking" it (there is no official name).

Since nested Prefabs came out in 2018, users have been asking to make encapsulation part of regular Prefab workflows. BlackBox enables just that, with a single component.

📦 LOCKING 📦

Once you add the BlackBox component, any Prefab with a number of children GameObjects and components appears as a single object in the hierarchy in the Scene. The user can only change the Transform properties, and enable/disable it. To modify other properties, simply open it in Prefab mode and make changes as usual.

📦 REVEAL PROPERTIES 📦

If you have an important property that needs to be shown in the scene, you can add them to a list of revealed properties. These special properties are going to show up on the Prefab root even when the Prefab is locked! (see images) ✨

All property types are supported out of the box!

📦 PREVENT APPLY 📦

When properties have been revealed, you can take it one step further and prevent the Prefab user from Applying the overrides, while they can still Revert them. This enables extra safety for now it's impossible for the user to mess with the original Prefab asset in any way.

Documentation

You can preview the documentation and learn all about the functionality before you get the asset.

Feedback

If there is a workflow BlackBox doesn't cover, I'd like to hear from you how I can make BlackBox better. You can write to [email protected] and we can assess if it can be added to the asset. Or hop on my Discord to have a chat.