Issue with duplicate assets in the new AssetBundle System

[liiir1985]

We are currently migrating our project to unity5.0 to benefit from the new features such as the new AssetBundle building pipeline.

Everything looks wonderful in the documentation, but when we actually tried out, we encounter some issue, that the same assets get duplicated in several assetbundles.

We have a test uGUI panel as a prefab, which has references to some sprites. We’ve set the sprites’s assetbundle property to a seperate assetbundle.
Then we’ve built the bundles with BuildPipeline.BuildAssetBundles. Everything went well, I got the assetbundles like I’ve set to, except, the file size of the ui prefab is even bigger than the sprite bundle. This apparently shows that the sprite assets got duplicated both in the prefab bundle and the sprite bunld.
This makes the dependency building of the new assetbundle system useless.
Am I missing something? Or did I mess something up

PS. I’m using Unity 5.1.3

[Prodigga]

See my posts here

This is a serious issue… trying to get a hold of unity devs so they could advise on this ‘feature’.

Copied my post to this this thread since this thread is more on topic:

We used to be able to exclude dependencies in 4.x, so we knew exactly what was in our bundles.

Now in 5.x, dependencies are always collected. Why? Why can’t we disable this? I no longer feel in control of what goes in to my bundle.

This is causing some real issues with shaders…! They turn pink, because, as mentioned above, the shader is precompiled for the target platform and included in the bundle (whether you like it or not!). This means that if I am testing in the Editor and have my platgorm set to Android, any asset bundle I load in the Editor will contain pink materials.

In 4.x, I used to exclude shaders from my asset bundles. My shaders were included in the resources folder and I was able to make the assumption that it would always be there. This way, I could exclude the shader from my bundle. When I loaded the bundle, it would use the shader already included in the application (and so it would always be the correct shader, since the shader was already compiled for the current platform whether it be windows, osx, ios or Android).

We can’t do this anymore. We need to build our asset bundles for all 3 platforms. Windows/OSX, iOS and Android.

This raises other questions too - for example, since the shader inlcuded in the bundle isn’t the exact same shader as the one in my project (it is a precompiled copy), does this break batching? Imagine if I had a custom diffuse shader which I used on all of my assets, and I had 10 asset bundles all containing different meshes/prefabs with materials that used this custom diffuse shader… Will this break dynamic batching since each asset bundle has its own copy of the same shader??

What about if I had a texture in my project that all of these prefabs were referencing? Forced dependency collection means that this texture will be copied 10 times (once for each bundle). So if I load and instantiate the prefabs in all 10 of these bundles, is this texture loaded into memory 10 times? (10x copies of the same texture).