UnityLock is a small utility that allows you to nearly completely lock any game objects in your scene from being edited. The idea is that you can identify pieces of your scene that you want to prevent from being accidentally moved or deleted, or perhaps from being edited entirely. These objects may be your primary scene geometry, some game manager type object, or anything else.
UnityLock adds a "UnityLock" submenu to the GameObject menu in Unity. Inside this submenu are four menu items:
- Lock Game Object
- Lock Game Object and Children (Shortcut: Cmd-Shift-L for OS X or Control-Shift-L for Windows)
- Unlock Game Object
- Unlock Game Object and Children (Shortcut: Cmd-Shift-U for OS X or Control-Shift-U for Windows)
These all behave the same way with regards to the objects, however you can choose whether you want to lock only the selected game object(s) or if you'd like to lock their children as well. Given that most people want to lock an entire hierarchy, those are the items that have the convenient keyboard shortcuts.
Locking a game object has the follow effects in the editor:
- Disables all 3D scene transform controls. Users cannot move, rotate, or scale the transform.
- Disables all inspectors for all components on the object.
- Prevents adding or removing components to/from the object.
- Prevents the object from being deleted from the scene.
- Prevents editing any top-level game object properties, such as the name, tag, layer, and static flags/toggle.
Locking an object does NOT prevent users from changing the parent-child hierarchy of an object. This is a limitation of Unity as UnityLock sets the object to not be editable however Unity still allows the parent-child hierarchy to change in the editor.
There are also some options available if you wish to customize the behavior of UnityLock. You will find a preferences window available in the Window menu which exposes all options and a description of what each one does.