Unity 5 AssetBundles and Scenes

Unity Engine
1

So after watching Vincent’s presentation from Unite 2014 on Asset Bundles in Untiy 5 I haven’t been able to find any more information on it.

I’m new to asset bundles and am trying to start learning with the way Unity 5 will do it rather than learning old ways that will be deprecated once Unity 5 comes out.

I am hoping to architect my project in a way that scripts are the only thing in the client, and Everything else is an asset from an asset bundle including scenes, prefabs, everything!

I have some questions about workflow and how to best utilize this new system.

  1. if i have two scenes, one that has just a UI button that loads the other scene, and the other scene that just has a prefab of a cube in it. The 1st scene is included in the build, and the second scene is not. the cube is in its own asset bundle that the scene depends on.

at runtime i want to load the manifest, load the scene bundle and the cube bundle, and then switch to that scene.

I want the loaded scene to load the resource for the cube from the asset bundle for the cube.

Does this sound like something that makes sense to people? or something that is just crazy.

Does every scene that could possibly be loaded at runtime from an AssetBundle need to be included in the build settings? if so than what is the point of loading it from an asset bundle if its included in the build?

Any tutorials or helpful links on best practices that make use of assetbundling would be greatly appreciated.

I want to be able to host as much of my game as possible on CDN so that only the scripts need to be compiled int the client and shipped with it. Thus allowing me to essentially load completely seperate games so long as they all share the same scripts.

1 Like
2

A few tutorials on the new AssetBundles is getting to be top of my list of needs now. I can see in the inspector that there’s the ability to add or tag items to AssetBundles, but where do we go from there?

3

I’m also in a similar situation, I’m brand new to Asset Bundles and need to get started using them ASAP, but don’t want to do the old standard work if Unity 5 is around the corner… not sure what to do.

4

It’s not around the corner.

It’s that speck of dust off in the distance. It won’t be here for a good while.

5

Yea good point, I’m going to just use the old setup I suppose.

6

We will very soon release a demo project for how to use the fancy new asset bundle pipeline in practice.

3 Likes
7

Brilliant, working examples is exactly what we need. Awesomeness, thank you.

8

Idk what “new” asset bundle pipeline you talking about, I never used asset bundles, omnly resources folder, and when I switched to 5 it took me one day to learn how to use them. Its not rocket science really.

9

Yep, AssetBundles and the Resources folder are very different things.
Assets within the Resources folder are included within the build. AssetBundles are separate to the build and can be downloaded and cached on the client’s machine (like an update to an MMORPG), or streamed at runtime from a server.
Building AssetBundles and extracting the assets isn’t the simplest of things, but hopefully the new pipeline and workflow will improve that.

(Especially for uncompressed AssetBundles that are downloaded as “patches” and kept on the client’s machine, in an MMO stylee; as that’s what I do)

10

Just post a basic introduction of AssetBundle and a demo project. You can find them at New AssetBundle build system in Unity 5.0 - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions

1 Like
11

Yes i see that Vincent! Thank you very much! This will get rid of sooo many headaches in my projects!