Player Control / Prefabs

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Hello,

I have a question regarding the logic of player control. Given that Photon needs the player to be a prefab in the Resources Folder, and a prefab player is not able to communicate with hierarchy game objects (particularly things like a UI click button), how can I satisfy Photon's Resource folder constraints and also satisfy Unity's demand that I have a hierarchy object accessing my hierarchy UI and Hash Tables? I'll tack on a second question... I've got a 4 character player selection screen, and I'm wondering if I should be using an empty prefab in Resources that spawns & then gets 14 or so components from inactive game objects in the scene?

Thanks for the help,

Luis