Preventing organization insanity when dealing with large sets of assets?

Unity Engine
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1

I’m labeling this as “Feedback” but perhaps I’m missing something in the recent updates which make my issues disappear. So don’t hesitate to inform me if that’s the case. And in case some relevant discussions are already going on, I’d love to hear them. The search function didn’t reveal a lot of relevant posts.

I’m setting up assets in the Addressables system, and I’m coming across some practical issues, perhaps due to my use-case.

I’m having quite a lot of assets, and luckily they are divisible in groups. So far so good. Those groups all can get a label, and I can query my assets just fine.

However, each group can have a lot of assets, and that quickly becomes hard to work with visually. Unless I’m mistaken there is no easy way to have subgroups. There is the dash-naming “trick” I’ve seen, but the visual representation of that isn’t great and it all gets messy fast.

With respect to labels, in our scenario we use them to also provide some clue as to what assets - in different groups - could mix and match. So let’s say a label “commonproperty”, which means that if an asset from “Group A” and an asset from “Group B” share that, they could be used together in our application.

However, all labels are part of a single set, so once again I end up with a massive list of labels. And for those of us who have to add assets to the setup, from a UX point of view it’s quickly becoming cumbersome to deal with, and rather error prone.

In an idea world what we have been wondering is the following:

  • Would it be possible to have sub-grouping. Even if that’s only an in-editor visualization construct with only the leafs being actual groups.
  • How about label grouping? Once again, if only to reduce the visual overhead of having a long list of labels.

Perhaps Addressables were never meant for more fine-grained asset tagging and are only suitable for higher-level groupings. But I’m getting to a point where I’m once again writing our own asset organization code, which is somewhat unfortunate. Especially if I ultimately want to leverage Addressables still for bundle builds and have to keep things in sync.

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Happy to flag this for the team! Real quick, which version of Addressables are you using?

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I am pretty much following along with all updates. I’m on 1.19.6 at the moment.

4

I have this same issue.
A better way to organize the groups would be amazing.

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  • Would it be possible to have sub-grouping. Even if that’s only an in-editor visualization construct with only the leafs being actual groups.

We had AssetEntryCollections previously, which caused issues (and still does) with performance and scalability. We could revisit this in the future as there appears more demand.

You may have missed folder entries. The main way to organise within groups is by using project folders.
You can assign a folder as addressable. This makes all Asset within that folder (that are not explicitly marked addressable) as addressable. These Assets all take on the labels from the folder asset, and will have the address /

  • How about label grouping? Once again, if only to reduce the visual overhead of having a long list of labels.

We are currently adding a search filter and easier ways to add new labels from the Groups window.
labels like “enemy_faction/orc” could be interesting, like menus work. I will look into this.

Thank you for the feedback.
Andy

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I have seen the folder entries solution but I thought that was just a way to more quickly create addressable references and don’t see how that’s a way to better organize your addressable bundles, seems like 2 separate topics. Also, you cant change the keys to objects within the folder entries groups so its hard to use that for things that are not exclusively referenced.

But now that you mention that, the way the folder entries thing handles the multiple group views is exactly what we need, just make it customizable instead of forced to follow the project folder layout.

7

Glad that works for you

We will see what we can do, but I cannot make any guarantees at this stage.

Thanks,
Andy

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I just wanted to clarify, it does not work for me. Folder Entries is not a usable solution for project organization for my needs.

It would be an almost usable workaround if it was updated to where you can change the keys for assets within the folder entries groups, but even then… not really a solution. (if I did this, I would run into other issues that would be more frustrating to find solutions for)

This is actually a pretty large tech debt area that becomes more and more complex to deal with the larger the project gets. Especially when you start adding in DLC

Would be nice if when your search for something it would list the groups the items are in instead of just the asset itself, which makes it really hard to use. Or if when you select something while searching, when removing your search entry it should auto move the window to highlight what you had highlighted when you selected during the search. (like how the rest of the search bars in unity work)

Currently when I search for something it lists a bunch of things with my search value, but most of the listed items are indirect bundles and not the bundle I directly want to load, and its hard to find the correct one because it ends up being a wall of assets instead of being able to look for the group the asset are in.

Then when I do find the asset, I don’t know what group it’s in so I select it and remove my search entry in hopes it will auto direct me to where that asset is, but nope.

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The trick to do this is to select the addressable entry and press “f” (for “frame”); the search will be cleared, and the asset will still be selected.

This can be done in other windows as well, at least “Scene”, “Project” and “Hierarchy”.

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Yes, I am aware, the issue with that is that the group is closed when it auto-selects it so it’s not very helpful because I have to find which closed group it’s in.

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It does expand the group and all parent subentries for me, at least in versions 1.18.11 and the latest 1.19.11, with Unity 2020.3.18 (on Windows, which I guess wouldn’t matter?).

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That’s good to hear, I am using the verified version for 2020 lts and it does not.
Altho that’s just a tiny plus in the overall issue

13

We also have hierarchical search method.
Select the magnifying glass in the search bar to change search settings. This is across Unity, not just Addressables, if the search has options.

With the hierarchical search, the Group is included in the search results. So you can use that to see what Group your search result is using.

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apparently has been a solution implemented for a few versions now.