By default, SceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary Reloading is enabled. This means that when you enter Play Mode, Unity destroys all existing Scene GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
See in Glossary and reloads the Scene from disk. The time it takes for Unity to do this increases with the complexity of the Scene, which means that as your project gets more complex, you have to wait longer between the moment you press the Play button and the moment the Scene fully loads in the Editor.
When you disable Scene Reloading, the process takes less time. This allows you to more rapidly iterate on the development of your project. Instead of reloading the Scene from disk, Unity only resets the Scene’s modified contents. This avoids the time and performance impact of unloading and reloading the Scene. Unity still calls the same initialization functions (such as OnEnable, OnDisable and OnDestroy) as if it were freshly loaded.
When you disable Scene Reloading, the time it takes to start your application in the Editor is no longer representative of the startup time in the built version. Therefore, if you want to debug or profile exactly what happens during your project’s startup, you should enable Scene Reloading to more accurately represent the true loading time and processes that happen in the built version of your application.
For more information, refer to How to configure Play Mode.
To disable Scene Reloading:
Disabling Scene Reload should have minimal side effects on your project. However, because Scene Reloading is tightly connected to Domain Reload, there are a few important differences:
ScriptableObject and MonoBehaviour fields that are not serialized keep the values assigned to them during Play mode on returning to Edit mode. This is because Unity does not recreate existing objects or call constructors. To understand what is and isn’t serialized in different contexts, refer to How Unity uses serialization. Note that private fields are not serialized as part of the regular build pipeline but are serialized as part of the Editor’s hot reloading of scripts. This is why private fields you modify in Play mode might reset to their original values on exiting Play mode even when scene and domain reload on enter Play mode are disabled.
Unity converts null private and internal fields of array/List type to an empty array/List object during Domain Reload and they stay non-null for runtime (non-Editor) scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
See in Glossary.
Scripts that use ExecuteInEditMode, or ExecuteAlways scripts do not receive OnDestroy or Awake calls. Unity does not call Awake, and only calls OnEnable when EditorApplication.isPlaying is already true on Play Mode change with Awake/OnEnable methods that check the EditorApplication.isPlaying property. Nonserialized fields for runtime (non-Editor) scripts should not be an issue because these are not active in Edit Mode, however scripts marked with ExecuteInEditMode or ExecuteAlways might change themselves or touch fields of other runtime scripts. To work around this, initialize any affected fields in an OnEnable callback yourself.