We currently have the ability in our project to build standalone builds which include all assets (package builds) as well as builds which load asset bundles and other files from a CDN (CDN builds). To make this possible, most of our dynamically loaded art is under Resources folders.
Most of the time, artists and designers want to run in the editor or build a package build so that they can load new assets which they have created instead of the data on the CDN. So, we default to using the Resources folders.
When we build a CDN build, we have to rename the Resources folders so that they are not included in the build. This takes several minutes for the AssetDatabase to update, both before and after the build. This step can also cause issues if the build fails or somebody kills the Unity process because they think that it has stopped responding.
This is workable, but it’s clunky and slow. It would be great if we could specify a list of assets and/or directories to be included in standalone builds, similarly to how we can specify scene files to be included. That would solve the speed issues with our build process, and would allow us to build smaller standalone builds for the artists that only include the new files that they have added, while loading the rest of the files from the CDN.
Is there any plan to implement this functionality? If not, could there be? Thanks.
Now that I think of it, is it possible that the Scriptable Build Pipeline may provide this functionality? I’ve previewed the SBP for bundle builds, but the lack of documentation kept me from really digging into all of its features.