Generating Addressable Assets update without a player build, using the API?

Addressable Assets: 0.4.8-preview
Unity: 2018.2.7f1

My scenario is this: I have a mod system I am building for my game, and I wish modders to be able to generate mod content packages based on the assets they provide (which include some text files as well as textures and sounds.) I'd like them to be able to do this without a player build (I think?), or at least without having to have built the player themselves (I could distribute a relevant artifact to them that relates to a player build, if necessary). Their mod will be adding new assets, and *possibly, but less likely* replacing existing assets (i'd consider these separate scenarios if one requires NYI features.) I already have written the code needed to understand their mod package and add the requisite assets to the right groups with the right labels, so now I am just stuck at the build part.

Question: How can I allow my modders to produce a set of addressable assets without them having to do a player build? Ideally I'd like to be able to trigger this build from a build script (so I can produce a headless process for them), so knowing which APIs need to be invoked to achieve this would be excellent.

Also, as a point of clarification, which schema should I be attaching to the group (I'm curently using ContentUpdateGroupSchema and BundledAssetGroupSchema, is this correct?)

Thanks in advance

 

your schema selection is correct.

As to the modding. If your users are only updating content (no code changes) then the addressable system should be able to handle it. The problem is that you'd either need to give them a Unity project with the appropriate data (so they could run Addressables to build a new content catalog), or you need to write a custom tool for the user to use to generate a new catalog. It's all doable, but definitely not something I could quickly explain in a forum post.

Eventually we plan to have this sort of advanced workflow documented, or at least provide a few hints to guide you, but right now, this is somewhat outside the out-of-the-box supported behavior.

 

Great - glad to hear at least its on the roadmap. For now I'll use the more constrained flow and wait for further guidance as the feature matures.

 

I have a similar problem as described above, has there been any progress on at documenting some of the advanced workflows? I have a situation where the modders would only be able to add content, and I'm thinking about building a tool to let them generate the new catalog. If there's any documentation for that workflow, that would be great. Thanks.

 

Likewise.

 

Any news about the documentation for this kind of workflow? I'm gonna need to create this kind of tool and this information will be so helpful. Thanks!