Discussion Could a .zip be used as an alternative to an assetbundle?

Hello!
I am working on an open-source project. It consists of many different minigames, each with its own prefab, textures, sound effexts, and scripts. Currently, we are in the process of switching to using assetbundles for these scenes, for better loading.

However, a goal of our project is to have custom textures easily importable. While our assetbundle system is still being worked on, it's not much of a priority. Eventually, though, we want users to be able to click a button to import their textures in-game. Ideally, we could then pack these into an easily shareable format. Of course, assetbundles can't be built outside of the Unity editor. That's a problem, as we want adding custom textures to be as accessible as possible.

The program already uses .zips to save and import custom levels, so I was wondering if we could use .zips as an alternative to assetbundles. They could contain the prefab, textures, and anything else we need (except scripts of course), though only the textures would actually need to be changed by the user. Is this a feasible solution?

 

Images can be downloaded by your game in a zip format, and then imported and converted to a texture at runtime like so:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Networking.UnityWebRequestTexture.GetTexture.html

Prefabs, scenes and other types for which there is no importer in the runtime can only be loaded via assetbundles.