Addressables - Always the answer?

Unity Engine
1

I’ve taken a few looks into moving from Asset Bundles to Addressables over the past couple of years but I still can’t see how its the way to go for every situation.

In my case, I have a bundle of bitmaps that can be combined/blended in a number of complex ways, right now I download the “bitmaps” bundle before hand, if this hasn’t downloaded I just do a failover quick draw of a default graphic, if it has downloaded i can create any of my textures synchronously with no fears.

Am I misunderstanding Addressables? Say if I want to combine 20 of these bitmaps as addressables, I have to asynchronously load each image with AsyncOperationHandle (I know this can be synchronously completed with Synchronous Workflow | Addressables | 1.17.17 this). But I would need a way to pre-download all of these before even thinking about trying to call these (like I can with asset bundles) and avoid a way of adding “negligible” overheads to things that need to be optimized as far as is possible.

Is there a way to do these things with Addressables? It seems more and more assets take advantage of addressables and where things can be asynchronous it seems like a great tool, but I’m having some trouble understanding why in my case it would be beneficial over asset bundles.

2

You can pre-download your group (bundle) (where you have your bitmaps) so that it is stored in the cache: Look at Addressables.DownloadDependenciesAsync then any load request to any asset of that group will not have the overhead of downloading the bundle, note that at the bottom of the documentation there is a cache limitation for some platforms.

If you don’t want to load each image individually (after pre-downloading) you can use labels to load them all. Also, this kind of questions will definitely get more answers in the Addressables section

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3

Thank you so much and also thank you for the direction to the appropriate place! I’ll take another shot today at this

4

Keep in mind that Addressables use asset bundles under the hood, so technically you are still using asset bundles.

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