Is it possible to save a compressed asset bundle to disk in uncompressed form.

Questions & Answers
1

I am working on a game where I have an asset bundle for each level. The idea is that these will be downloaded and saved to disk the first time the user plays a level. These asset bundles contain a number of scenes, and are about 50MB in size if compressed and about 350MB in size in uncompressed form.

From what I have read so far it looks like I have two options on how to load these asset bundles.

Option 1: Compressed form.

In this option I download the asset bundle to disk in its compressed form. Then, when I want to use it I do:

m_file = new WWW(@"file://<path to file>");
m_assetBundle = file.assetBundle;

Then I load my scenes as I need them

Application.LoadLevel("Scene1");
...
Application.LoadLevel("Scene2");

When I return to the main menu I do:

m_assetBundle.Unload(false);
m_file.Destroy

The problem with this method is that my 50MB asset bundle needs to be in RAM the whole time, which is a pretty big overhead.

Option 2: Uncompressed form

In this option I have created my asset bundle in uncompressed form (350MB) and have downloaded it to the disk.

When using I do:

m_assetBundle = AssetBundle.CreateFromFile("<path to file>");

Then I load my scenes as I need them

Application.LoadLevel("Scene1");
...
Application.LoadLevel("Scene2");

When I return to the main menu I do:

m_assetBundle.Unload(false);

This option gives much better memory usage (there is no 50MB overhead) but the user has to download a 350MB asset bundle.

Question

Is there a way to combine the best of these two options? Can I download my asset bundle in compressed form (50MB), uncompress it, and save it to disk in the uncompressed form (350MB). Then I can use the asset bundle directly from disk by using AssetBundle.CreateFromFile().

Many thanks

2

Let users download compressed asset bundle, then if user try to open this asset bundle in your game, let the game uncompress it, save uncompressed assets on specific directory and remove compressed bundle.

You could also pack asset bundles into self extracting archive with extraction script, but id prefere first approach - self extracting scripts can lead to some problems, also forcing users to download and run binaries from the internet is not really elegant.