Convert extremely large scene to addressables without too much pain

Hi guys, I have a ridiculously large scene which holds my entire game in it all at the same time. I turn on and off parts as they are needed, yes it uses a ton of ram lol. Im trying to move away from using ordinary Resources, for speed/performance and to get around the 4 gig texture limit, as well as allow my game files to be downloaded from a server somewhere.

Is there a way to just make this entire scene addressable and build out asset bundles from it? I have read and watched a lot about asset bundles and addressables but I find it somehow confusing. What would be the best approach to convert this huge scene (>200meg) into using the asset bundles/addressables system to achieve the objectives mentioned above? Thanks.

 

Sure, you can make the whole scene addressable, and load with Addressables.LoadSceneAsync. But you won't get much benefits. The whole scene turns into a bundle file, whenever you make an update, you need to redistribute the huge file.

The common usage of addressable is on the actual asset level, you mark your images, animations, models as addressables, and load / update on demand.

However, if you split the huge scene into some smaller sub scenes, then mark those scenes as addressables, and load them on demand, you can still get benefit from the system on some levels.

Legacy Resource.Load can be migrated automatically, see more in migration guide.

 

I am in the same boat. A couple massive scene files that I'd like to not get baked into massive bundle files. I think my ideal end result would a bunch of ~50mb bundles instead of a couple ~1gb bundles.

It sounds like if the assets have addresses, they wouldn't get baked into the scene bundle, so it'd just be a matter of assigning addresses in a way that groups them into appropriate chunks? Has anyone written any scripts yet to go through levels and automatically assign addresses to the used assets semi-intelligently?

(I haven't dug into the API yet, but hopefully there's an editor API function to set address, and some other general purposes Unity editor function to get an array of assets in use by a scene)

 

Thanks @unity_bill, that gives some great starting points. Can you confirm if AnimationClips and AudioClips will be flattened into the scene or to bundle (or more generally, is there a list of types of each category somewhere?) Already just getting the textures and meshes into their own bundle should help our filesize massively.

 

So, when we have an instance of a prefab, addressable or not, it gets saved into the scene? I thought the scene only referenced the GUID of the prefab.

 

AssetReference only stores GUID, so not get flatten.