How to overcome the Scene file size Limit?

Questions & Answers
1

Hi there!

Does anyone know how we can overcome the Scene file size limit (4GB, I think) in Unity 2020.1?
I am asking this because it seems there is scene size limit of 4GB; and I think my scenes will easily go above that (like I could end up with 20GB scene), some people wrote before that the scenes become corrupt and could no longer be opened if they exceeded 4GB in file size; well some people tried to load 9GB scene and Unity did not want to open it anymore saying: ‘scene file size exceeded’.

So far, what I gathered:

  • Splitting the scene into small additive scenes (this ends up splitting the scene file size).
  • Editing the Scene file itself…finding the possible culprit in it; some dev said that it is the ‘vertex’ data the problem; and that if you remove the vertex index data for the largest models…it reduces the scene file size. You would have to do this to all the largest models.
  • Using Prefabs for everything, and less gameobjects, supposedly, prefabs usage cuts scene size by 10 times…
  • Using Asset Bundles (although, from I gathered they, still, have 4GB limit too)
  • I can’t believe there is no one that has faced this problem/scene size limit before…how did companies who made big games (and surely had Larger Scene Sizes (over 4GB)…how did they solve this limit?..

Thanks in advance for any help.

2

It seems as though you have answered your own question. It is indeed best practice to break your scene into smaller parts for a whole number of reasons. It will make everything easier to maintain, as you can update individual prefabs and scenes rather than having to dig through one monolithic scene to find the object you need to work on. It will also dramatically improve your unity performance to not have gigabytes of stuff loaded into memory at once. When you are making a game at that scale you would be needing to dynamically load in assets as the player moves around etc, otherwise you are going to get terrible performance, or run out of memory entirely.