Addressables are no longer caching after update

Asset & Content Management Addressables
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1

I have a project built in Unity 2020.3.27f1 / Addressables 1.19.1.17.

I’ve recently updated it to Unity 2022.3.3f1 / Addressables 1.21.18.

I’ve rebuilt my asset bundles and catalog, and placed on my remote location. They download fine from the client in the editor and builds as expected - but everytime I restart - they need to be downloaded again.

Inspecting my Appdata/LocalLow/Unity/CompanyName folder, there’s no files being cached.

If I run old builds made in the Unity 2020.3.27f1, their files cache in this folder just fine.

I’ve attempted this through my various Addressable managing code, and direct ‘Addressables.DownloadAssetAsync’ and ‘Addressables.InstantiateAssetAsync’ calls, and I get the same results every time.

Does anyone else have experience with this issue, or can provide some advice?

Some non-typical things with my setup, which may be relevant:

  • I have a catalog override, which I manually rename to the version number to avoid too many files.
  • I am reading my addressables off a networked file path, rather than through a CDN. This makes Addressables GetDownloadSizeAsync think the file is 0kb - however in the past it still cached.
2

I fixed it!

Boy, that was a painful run around. I did many… many… many tests and trouble shooting fixes, installing, uninstalling, changing paths, making new projects etc etc etc.

What fixed it?

I had to add the ‘file://’ protocol to my load path.

Most importantly, I had to add it with four slashes - e.g. ‘file:////servername/folder/file’

When I did this, it started to cache again just fine.

Hope this helps some other poor hapless bastard that comes across this esoteric issue…

3

An addition for the second part of my question, if you’d like to get the GetDownloadSync to return the actual download size - you can modify the addressable package as unity_shane indicates here:

4

adding myself here to as starting with a game dev and it looks caching is a big issue.