Powerhoof! Find Object References in Unity...


A unity tool to find prefabs that reference an object

I don’t post here much because Barney has all the cool art to show and I just do programming which is sooooo boooooring. But the blog was getting so interesting that it needs some mega-dull code related stuff to tone it down. (Seriously, code is super boring. It’s literally just text. Like one of those books that don’t even have any pictures in, or a website with zero rotating skull gifs)

Anyway, made a tiny tool which is pretty useful if you’re using unity and your project’s starting to get unmanageably big like ours is for Crawl. It searches through the dependencies of all your prefabs to find which ones reference an object/script.

image

To use it, grab the code from here (it needs to be in under a folder named “Editor”).

Then you can right click an object or script in the project window and click “Find References”. It’ll pop up a window with all the prefabs, which you can select from there, or click the little arrow to dig deeper. EASY!

-Dave

  1. Rafer45

    Nice! Thank you for typing up the game’s vital liquids and innards.

    I don’t really understand a lick of C# but I appreciate you making this public.

    If you don’t mind the question, how did you get started with Unity? Do you have any resources you’d recommend?

    Reply
    • One of the great things about unity is how much information there is out there, just because so many people are using it. There’s a lot of tutorials to get you started making various types of games. I’d have a search for one thats similar to what you want to make and just dive in from there.

      Reply
  2. Sepehr Sobhani

    Thank you for posting this. I would love to hear more about the development methodologies you use and anything else technical you find interesting.

    Reply
    • Yeah it’s hard to know where to start and what kind of thing would be interesting. I try to expose as much as functionality as I can in the editor and keep things as flexible as possible to make it easy for Barney to try lots of crazy stuff. That’s key to how we work together really.

      Reply
  3. Considering I am schnitzel at programming and I was considering GameMaker for a noob like me, is Unity hard for somebody with no programming knowledge? Or, is it hard to learn all you need to use it decently? XD And another question regarding the soundtracks…I know you didn’t make some of the music,but if you did any soundtracks for the game,what program did you use?
    I find FL studio a nice one,but I suppose pro game makers might use something…different xD
    Cheers and keep up the good work! *If i were rich i’d buy many copies and distribute around everyone i know ahah*

    Reply
    • I’d say gamemaker is a good bet, especially if you’re interested in making 2d stuff. The good thing about coding skills is they transfer really easily between different things, so if you get started on game maker the principles you learn will be useful in unity and other engines too.

      For music, Ableton Live is the program most people I know use to make music, I think that’s what most people would recommend.

      Hope that helps!

      Reply
      • Thanks a lot Dave ^-^ hope i can make some good use of this advice and start learning some stuff :p GL with the developing,cant wait for the official launch of Crawl :3

        Reply
  4. Marudice

    Very good work!
    I introduced this and made some improvement to find references by SceneAsset or ScriptableObject.

    http://marudice.hatenablog.jp/entry/2020/01/13/123407

    Reply
    • Oh, excellent stuff! Thanks!

      Reply
      • Ruhken

        Really nice work, both of you!

        I took both of your Ideas and took them a bit further by introducing an async search that allows you to keep working in Unity while the search is going on. It also finds all references in the scene currently open.

        https://github.com/Johannes-Kutsch/Unity-Asset-Reference-Finder

        Reply
        • Ace! It’s great to see improved versions of my little thing!

          Reply
        • You guys are awsome! All three of you <3

          Reply
        • Does your script still work on latest Unity versions? I also can’t even find the Find References link.

          Reply
        • Does your script works on latest versions of Unity? I tried having a scriptable object that is referenced in another scriptable object but I can’t find the referencing scriptable object.

          Reply
          • Sorry, I missed this comment. I think my original script still works. I just checked it in my project, and it showed up references to scriptable objects for me. I may have made some fixes when updating unity at some point if it started giving compile errors, but not because it ever stopped working that I can remember.

          • ccoddes

            Hello, I’m not sure about Dave’s original script, but I’ve fixed Marudice’s version to work with ScriptableObject referencers too. I think the label for ScriptableObject showed but there was no actual collection of ScriptableObjects, so I made a minor tweak to do so. It’s working on Unity 2021.1.17f1. You can find it here: https://pastebin.com/31nxsJ36

            Again, big ups to the authors before me, this is a helpful tool.

          • Excellent stuff, thanks for sharing!

  5. Great tool, thank you very much for sharing!

    Reply
  6. SoyNassimYT

    Thanks for this tool.

    Reply
  7. Laurent

    I love you so much. Thank you for making this. I also enjoyed Crawl very much 😛

    Reply

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