I want to split up my bundle as efficiently as possible. This includes avoiding duplicates in bundles. So My current setup is I have bundle A and bundle B and lets say bundle Commons that includes shared assets between these 2 bundles (thing like fonts and maybe some other assets). When I load these bundles I was under impression it will get automatically referenced (especially because bundle browser offers me an option to extract duplicates) but that doesn’t seam to be the cast and reference is just missing (for the font example there is no font even tough the common bundle is loaded).
Is there a way to handle this without explicitly telling the assets where is the reference (like assigning the correct font from commons to lets say bundles A text object)
The approach you describe makes sense and normally should be working, I’m not sure what is causing your reference to be null. I am not personally aware of how Fonts work, and haven’t hear of any known issue specific to that type.
E.g. If asset X in bundle A has a reference (set in the Editor) to an asset Y, that you put in bundle Commons, then the AssetBundles should also have that reference established between the objects in bundle A and an object inside Commons. You already mention that you loaded the Commons bundle along with bundle A and bundle B, so it should be able to resolve that reference.
Its a bit technical, but it is possible to check out exactly how the reference has been saved by using WebExtract and Binary2Text. Rather than trying to sketch out how to do that in this reply I’m attaching some previously accumulated notes that hopefully are helpful if you want to try to look under the hood a bit to see more about what is happening.
9010084–1241944–Viewing References inside AssetBundles.pdf (131 KB)
In the mean time I did a test on a smaller scale and it seams to work you just need to load the commons first. But I still have missing reference on a bigger scale that could just be my way of loading. Fonts actually act the strangest there are some missing and some not missing and they pull a lot of unused fonts into a bundle. Lets say I am using font xregular it will pull all the x fonts with it like xmedium xbold and so on even though it is not used. And together with fonts there are some text materials missing on some places. Maybe it is worth to note I am using Text Mesh Pro.