Ready for production?

I've noticed the lack of a "preview" prefix to the Addressables package. This is awesome news!

I've been excited to try this in production and I'm wondering, is it production ready? Or should we still hold off for a while?

 

I wouldn’t say it is if you need to release in the near future. There remain some nasty issues regarding dependency resolution that simply aren’t resolved yet.

It looks like they have made progress if you’re using 2019.3 but that doesn’t help us on LTS very much

 

The fix was backported to 19.2.3. It should land in 18.4.x soon, look for the following in the next few changelogs:

• Asset Bundles: Fix for Loading dependent AssetBundles fails to deserialize some scripts on Standalone builds (1154172, 1173948)

In general, other than this issue we have been alright shipping with Addressables but it does involve us fixing issues internally and/or modifying the package to out needs. That might not be to everyone's taste.

 

The nasty Unity dependency resolution bug should be fixed in 2018.4.9f1 according to that issue tracker.

 

Hopefully your situation has the same root as ours. We actually are in a situation where Addressables at times simply will fail to load assets / scenes in an actual playable build.

The asset bundles exist and with the expected hash names, but at runtime they cannot be found.

In some cases, if a scene fails to load, extracting all of the assets into a prefab and loading the prefab works. In some cases, if a scene previously worked and you do the same for its contents then it fails to load the prefab, but the scene still loads if you load the scene.

Using a hodge podge of scenes and prefabs *currenty* works for all scenes we have so far, but we are waiting for the moment where no approach works

 

Ok, that’s a totally different use case to us, we have no scenes in the bundles, only thousands of heavily interdependent scriptable objects, their asset dependencies and a few prefabs.

 

I think the scenes aren’t central to the problem since the failing to load can happen to either scenes *or* prefabs.

And mysteriously, sometimes the scene version will load while a big prefab won’t.... and other times a big prefab loads when a scene won’t

 

Curious. I would find it rather interesting to try and debug, although I suspect I’d quickly regret saying that if we end up being affected by it.

How does the failure to load manifest itself?

 

I beleive it is still not ready for production. Some weird issues remain, and I'm thankful and enthusiastic about frequent updates but it still needs some time. If your release is soon, you'd be better skipping it.
If your release is not soon, I think it's cool to start your implementation and setup so it can be ready when the package becomes more mature.