Using Addressables to handle loading/unloading arbitrary local/remote assets?

Unity Engine
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1

Hi! We’ve used Addressables a few times on other projects and are familiar with the way it works.

On this project we’re looking to load/unload texture/audio/text assets hosted on a server arbitrarily - without them having first been added to the addressables system.
We’re only interested in the ability to handle loading assets at a path from multiple sources, and don’t want any of the bits related to keys/catalogs/gameobjects/prefabs/offline Unity asset handling/asset bundling.
In theory Addressables is perfect for this, since it already has load handlers - but I’ve never tried using it this way before.

I can’t see any obvious way to go about this, or if it’s advisable if it’s possible at all. Has anyone looked into this?

2

Hi @tomkail_betterup as far as I know only text files can be loaded directly from a server (for example loading a json file by UnityWebRequest). All other assets must be packed into bundles in order to be loaded in your game.

The Addressables system expects to load assets from bundles. There are some ways though to customize the url used to load the assets: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.addressables@1.21/manual/runtime/TransformInternalId.html

3

Thanks for getting back! Sounds like that’s a no then! Ta!