Question How to allow assigning a specific asset to more than one Asset Bundle?

Hello, we are trying to assign a specific asset to more than one Asset Bundle (deliberately). However, the following exception appears

As a result, Unity fails and doesn't produce any asset bundles. Is it possible to somehow allow assigning a specific asset to more than one Asset Bundle? For example, can we "disable" this check or exclude certain files from the check?

Unity version: 2019.4.18f1 LTS


Some description and background on why we want to do this:

We want to include the debug information into our asset bundles. The debug information consists of various technical details about the project's current state (git state, configs used, etc), and this information is the same for all bundles. We save it to the file right before building the bundles and want to include it into each asset bundle.

The current workflow: we have a script that prepares our asset bundles (creates an array of AssetBundleBuild instances, one for each asset bundle) and then builds them with a single call of BuildPipeline.BuildAssetBundles. This is where the exception appears since we are trying to assign that file with debug information to all asset bundles. So, at the moment, this workflow isn't working.

Of course, we could call BuildPipeline.BuildAssetBundles for each AssetBundleBuild instance separately (prepare an instance, immediately build this single instance, then move to the next bundle) but that's not an option since, in this case, we lose quite a lot of benefits, e.g. the overall building time of all asset bundles drastically increases, also, the Manifest Bundle (the special asset bundle that is named after the directory where the asset bundles were built to) contains the information only for the latest built AssetBundleBuild instance, and so on.


We would be very thankful for any help. Thank you very much!

 

I have the same problem, can anyone help?

 

Still relevant for Unity 2021.3.11f1, any chance it will be addressed?

 

Bump. Any chance we get this option?

 

@AndrewSkow There is one situation where I believe it would be both safe and useful to allow assets to be included into multiple bundles: when building variants.

For example, if you're building textures into bundles textures.sd and textures.hd and you have a single texture that doesn't have an HD variant, then it would be useful if the SD texture could be assigned to both the sd and hd variant bundles. You currently have to make a copy of the file to achieve this, which is a bit wasteful.

As far as I can see, there shouldn't be any issues with references or dependency resolution if you allow an asset to be assigned to multiple variants of the same bundle, since
- Variant assets are effectively the same asset at runtime (same type and runtime identifier)
- Bundles do not depend on specific variants

So, for instance, if prefab Player in bundle prefabs contains a reference to PlayerTexture.png, which has been assigned to both textures.sd and textures.hd, then there is no ambiguity: the reference resolves to a single runtime asset identifier and the prefabs bundle has a dependency on the textures group of bundles. The outcome would be the same as if the texture file was copied.