model or prefab

[cassius]

I am abit confused about the pros and cons of loading in characters as prefabs. If I create them as prefabs will they still need controllers etc. What are the advantages ( if any ) from a coding point of view.

[ZioRed]

It depends on specific need, I mean the Prefabs advantage comes if you need to have something more inclusive than just a model, for example I created a prefab for my Player model which has the following hierarchy:

 

Player [Pivot, with CharacterController physics]

- Avatar model [for example the barbarian]

- Camera already positioned behind the avatar model

 

This way I load this prefab and don't need to create a camera and parent it to the player's model or write a class to change its position every frame (since I need a third person camera).

 

Another example could be a prefab for the enemies, it could contain for example the model itself and an AI attack trigger (well, I didn't look for now about triggers in LE, here I'm just talking by examples that I use on other engines but I suppose it will work here too in similar ways).

 

Another example of use of a prefab could be when you need to have a model with particular material/physics settings different from the original model, this way you create a prefab instead of doing everything through code.

 

Mainly prefabs allows you to setup an entity that else you should do by code at no cost, but they aren't substitutes but complementaries.