How can I view why an asset bundle is dependent on another

I was wondering if there was an easy way to see exactly why an assetbundle is dependent on another? I didn't see anything in the asset bundle browser and couldn't find anything in the documentation.

Unity Version: 2017.4.1f1

Thanks

 

We haven't found an easy way to do this. IMO, the Asset Bundle system works as a magic black box, where you don't have any visibility into what goes where, and why.

Assuming you have 2 bundles, A and B, and you want to find out why Bundle B depends on A:

What we have tried in the past:
1) (Making sure you have everything in Git, or backed up), remove Bundle A, and then in the Bundle Browser you can see which assets are auto-included.

2) In another case, we modified the source code for Asset Bundle Browser, to print to the console when a dependency was making it list another bundle in the browser window. This would produce a lot of output, but then you could dig and find out the culprit.

Both options are primitive and cumbersome.

 

Is there any progress on this topic?

 

In the AssetBundle Browser, if you select a bundle in the left panel, then select an asset in the list to the right, you'll see some info about that asset just below the list. One of these info messages lists all the assets that this asset depends on, along with the bundles these assets are in. It looks like this:

TheInspectedAssetName

Is dependent on other bundle’s asset(s) or auto included asset(s):

auto: SomeOtherAsset

bundleA: AnotherAsset

bundleB: YetAnotherAsset

So if you want to find out why, say, bundleA is dependent on bundleB, you can go through all the assets included in bundleA and find which assets are listing bundleB asset in the info block mentioned above.

It's still a manual process and may be tedious if your bundle is big, but should be fairly doable.