Asset Bundle Browser initial release

good!!!

 

nice.

 

so good!!!

 

I still don't understand why you guys are wasting time on these types of efforts; the node graph, this thing, it's all pointless.

The problem you should be solving is not one of interface, but of design. There is no world in which I want to manually design and build bundles; carefully trying to avoid duplicating data, with any mistake meaning things get duplicated in memory. Can you name a use case where having a user download an asset more than once and duplicating it in memory is desirable? On any reasonably sized project, it's a nightmare to use this system without writing tons of code to automate the process.

Simply slapping new interfaces on it every other month is doing nothing but eroding my belief that the problems of shipping a game with asset bundles are understood by Unity. You guys are polishing a flawed design.

 

Hi @Reichert , is there any update on the progress you're making with asset bundles (the API, tooling, etc as you mentioned) ?

Also, i submitted a PR against the "browser" repo. in case you guys want to check it out.

 

I like it, except if you have a lot of asset bundles, there doesn't appear to be a way to right click to create one (as the list gets long and there is no empty bundle space) so it just selects whatever bundle you right clicked on.

Is the intent to organize the bundles into folders? Does putting these in folders change the structure of the asset bundle any or it it just a way to organize them?

Thanks! It's a huge improvement over the old way of doing things as we have new bundles each month for different levels and the old way was a huge pain.

 

Hi Bill, I recently posted Dependencies seem to be "Editor-based" and therefore misleading as issue on GitHub and this is related: Originally, I assumed that Unity's build-system / dependency checks would work in a way so that any assets that are included in the "main build" (i.e. all assets used by scenes included in the build settings and not included in assetbundles) are available to scenes / assets stored in AssetBundles. If that was the case, one could very easily add a few scenes to AssetBundles and rely on Unity to put the Assets exclusively used by those scenes into the relevant bundles (potentially duplicating assets that are used by multiple scenes in asset bundles that are not part of the "main build").

Using the AssetBundleBrowser, however, it seems that this is not the case, and instead, you have to use an "all or nothing" approach when using AssetBundles: Any assets used by any scenes in the main build, that are also used by scenes or assets in AssetBundles will always be both in the main build and also added to the AssetBundles.

So that means when you use AssetBundles, in most scenarios you'll be best off to just have one tiny "loader"-scene that uses almost no Assets and kind of bootstraps the game by loading the first AssetBundle(s) which has the first actual scene because that way, it's all in AssetBundles.

Is that really the case? Or am I just confused due to limitations of the tools I am using (currently, I'm trying to figure things out using AssetBundle-Browser and AssetBundleEditor, but even though AssetBundleEditor gives me much better info on why an Asset is included in any given bundle, it still seems to rely on the dependencies from the editor-perspective, which may be misleading.

It seems that once the AssetBundles are built, one could get the actually relevant information: Which Assets Are Included In An Asset Bundle? ... it seems like this would probably provide for a much better workflow if that information is somehow added to what AssetBundle-Browser (or AssetBundleEditor) shows.

 

That is great to hear!

Do you have the information that those two systems are completely unaware of each other anywhere in the documentation? I believe that I have read most of the documentation about AssetBundles (including the tutorials and guidelines and "background information") at least one time, some parts several times ... and it only slowly dawned on me that this might be the case after running into some odd behaviors. The AssetBundleBrowser you're working on definitely helped realize this - but it's something I'd expect to read in the documentation. Actually, it probably should be one of the first things to read.

This is really not obvious - especially because normal player builds are uncompressed, and AssetBundles are usually compressed. So when I started using AssetBundles, my build size did decrease, even though I had lots of asset duplication in the builds.

Let me know what the best way is to let the documentation team know about this (if it's even an issue - but for me, it certainly was ;-) ).

Ironically, there is a fairly large section about how to organize AssetBundles in the manual - but it does not address this fairly fundamental issue (or at least I didn't see it addressing that issue).


Something else: It seems that another real minefield when using AssetBundles is shaders/materials. I noticed this when the terrain in some of our environments did not get effected by fog (there is also a related setting in the Player / Graphics settings, if I'm lucky this will fix this issue for me). One solution seems to be putting materials and shaders into the same AssetBundles so that the shader variants / keywords are properly handled. If that is the case, one nice feature for the AssetBundle browser would be to check materials / shader dependencies (i.e. give me a warning if I have the material without its shaders in a bundle). There may be even more to it (e.g. shaders used for image effects, or special purpose shaders may require some "special handling").

 

Ah, that does sound good - I'm already using ShaderVariantCollections extensively and actually started pulling in the Shaders using those collections. So if Unity AssetBundles behave well with ShaderVariantCollections, I'm covered ;-)

Thanks for passing the documentation feedback around.

 

6666

 

Will it be possible to include an asset in a bundle only on specific platforms?

We are using a custom asset bundle build tool which builds asset bundles out of folders. If you create a subfolder named "PS4" the assets in this folder will only be included in a PS4 build. Shared for all platforms, Standalone or Windows for Windows builds and so on.

This is used for config files, prefabs, textures (we don't need Xbox button sprites on a PS4 build) and many more assets.

 

Thank you for your fast reply.

Maybe you can implement a similiar feature in the future. As long as the current API is supported we will use our tool anyway. Our artists and designer are used to work with it.

 

Must scene asset bundles now be built from the same project that requests them, or can I (continue to) build them in one project and load them in another?

 

Can anyone confirm that they're able to load asset bundle scenes built from external projects? Is this a new policy, or an oversight, or a bug, or just me being dense? I hate to be a pest, but I'd really appreciate some official comment on this issue, I have a lot riding on it.

 

Why not try it out? (while you're waiting for an official response) I honestly don't have an answer for you, because I haven't done a scene bundle. I do asset bundles that can be built in older versions of the project (still same unity version, just older copies that don't have all my updates). But those are simply bundles with images in them, so nothing compared to what you're asking.

Hopefully someone from Unity or that has tried this will be able to get back with you!

 

Yes, it works for me on previous versions of Unity, but not on 2017x.

 

I found a solution to loading externally build scenes, see https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/asset-bundle-scenes-workflow.483974/

 

Hi, I'm loving asset bundle browser - helped us to eliminate lots of asset duplication. However, could you also check to see if asset bundle assets are referenced within a scene, as there is still duplication of assets (in our case, mixers), which took longer to track down without this brilliant tool Would it be able to be added that ABB will check if asset bundles are referenced in scenes in the build list?

 

Hi, I find that the asset bundle browser pulled wrong assets in AssetList sometimes.
For example, I set a SpriteAtlas to a bundle "spritesatlas/shop", then it show warning that there are duplicated dependency, but I am sure that that SpriteAtlas don't contain those sprites. And the log report also don't contains those sprites. Those duplicated Sprites are in another bundle.



Bundle Name: shop
Compressed Size:116.6 kb
Uncompressed usage by category:
Textures 1.3 mb 98.6%
Meshes 0.0 kb 0.0%
Animations 0.0 kb 0.0%
Sounds 0.0 kb 0.0%
Shaders 0.0 kb 0.0%
Other Assets 10.1 kb 0.8%
Levels 0.0 kb 0.0%
Scripts 0.0 kb 0.0%
Included DLLs 0.0 kb 0.0%
File headers 7.6 kb 0.6%
Complete size 1.3 mb 100.0%

Used Assets and files from the Resources folder, sorted by uncompressed size:
1.0 mb 78.9% Built-in Texture2D: sactx-1024x1024-fmt36-2b899810486a6337147d95e51b768f32
256.1 kb 19.7% Built-in Texture2D: sactx-256x1024-fmt36-2b899810486a6337147d95e51b768f32
1.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopItem_gems.png
1.5 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopItem_coins.png
1.5 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/SpriteAtlas/Shop.spriteatlas
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_gift.png
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_c.png
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_b.png
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_a.png
0.5 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_gemsCoins.png
0.5 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_popup_banner.png
0.5 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_new.png
0.4 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_gems_bg.png
0.4 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_coins_bg.png
0.3 kb 0.0% AssetBundle Object

 

Hi,

Why are bundles significantly larger than the actual size of the assets?
I've got assets totalling 7.7MB, and the bundle is 39MB. If I change the compression method, I get 59MB.
Using Unity 2017.3 - this wasn't happening in 5.6.x

Thanks

 

It's fine, I gave up assetbundles

 

hi there, im using the prefab method of a scene into asset bundle then this is take from server then cached etc, its all working but, my boss runs 10 fps on the maps scenes on the .exe version on editor it runs fine on both , here my exe run fine and all fine but i get the assets bundles from my local disk coz its more easy for test... what can be the cause of the issue some one?

 

Hi, great job! I'm using the AssetBundle Browser and I think this tool greatly simplifies my workflow using asset bundles.

One small feature I want to have is to build some bundle specifically. Like now I have tons of small bundles in the browser and when I change maybe one bundle and I want to build it but I can't, I can just build all of the bundles together which is time-consuming.

 

That won't be possible with the current asset bundle API without causing a manifest which only includes that specific bundle in the list.

 

Ah, I see, thanks for the quick reply.

 

If you change an asset bundle and rebuild them, only that one should build as long as it finds the other bundles in the folder already that you are saving them to.

 

How can i make a bundle of a scene with all their dependencies, when i try it tells me it doesnt allow scenes with other assets, i want to use something like the obsolete method
BuildPipeline.BuildStreamedSceneAssetBundle(levels, outputpath, BuildTarget.WebGL, BuildOptions.UncompressedAssetBundle);
It says its obsolete but i dont see any other alternative

 

I have the same problem as dienat but my issue is with scripts not getting packaged with the scenes.

I tried creating an asset bundle with one scene with a script that has just one debug statement , packaging it into an asset bundle ( using the asset bundle browser) to load it in another project. The script doesn't load at all.I was thinking of updating scenes on the fly using asset bundles , but it looks like its not feasible now . I am using 2018.2.5f1. Has anyone found a way to get this working?

 

Hi Bill ,

Thanks for the reply. I am familiar with the asset bundle browser. Used it to package and deploy assets ( excluding scripts ). I did look at Addressables but I wasn't able to find anything that covers scripts and scripts packaging there. Am I missing something ?

 

Bill - it's a very interesting topic as to why this is not possible.

I guess this was a very conscious design choice, but I am wondering what was the reason ? (Security ? Mobile app store regulations? etc)

 

I can't speak for most platforms, but for iOS, they require the script to be built with the app. Or, at least that was the way it was before. (Apple has a lot of strict regulations)

Now, there are suppose to be ways around this if you use something like lua\ruby, which I think would be if you were allowing user created content, but I'm not familiar with how that works, I've just seen it mentioned.

 

yes, i could guess that may be one of the reasons, *BUT* Unity is a cross-platform engine with over 20 different platforms you can export to. Having this restriction based on iOS alone seems strange to me.

 

I've found that asset bundles can contain scripts, as long as the player into which they're imported already contains the script and any dependencies. I use this for stuff like setting properties of hotspots. So while you can't distribute "new" code in an asset bundle, you can attach scripts that are / will be in the player.

 

Asset bundles never hold any scripts (old or new).

They can only hold serialized references to scripts that *already exist* in your built player.

 

that's what I meant to say