Asset Bundle Browser initial release

The first release of the Asset Bundle Browser is now available as an open-source editor extension here: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AssetBundles-Browser.
It is still very early in its life, so we recommend backing up your project before using it. All feedback is welcome. For full documentation, see the included README, otherwise see the high level overview below.

Overview
This tool enables the user to view and edit the configuration of asset bundles for their Unity project. It will block editing that would create invalid bundles, and inform you of any issues with existing bundles. It also provides basic build functionality.

This tool is intended to replace the current workflow of selecting assets and setting their Asset Bundle manually in the inspector. It can be dropped into any Unity project with a version of 5.6 or greater. It will create a new menu item in Window->AssetBundle Browser. The bundle configuration and build functionality are split into two tabs within the new window.

Configuration

The configuration window shows you a list of all bundles in your project. You can select bundles to see their asset lists, and select assets to see their details. You can drag bundles and assets around within this utility to change bundle assignment, as well as drag assets in from the Project Explorer.

Build
The Build tab provides basic build functionality to get you started using asset bundles. In most profressional scenarios, users will end up needing a more advanced build setup. All are welcome to use the build code in this tool as a starting point for writing their own once this no longer meets their needs.


Please reply to this post or add tickets to the github page with any questions, bugs, or feature requests.

 

good!!!

 

nice.

 

so good!!!

 

I still don't understand why you guys are wasting time on these types of efforts; the node graph, this thing, it's all pointless.

The problem you should be solving is not one of interface, but of design. There is no world in which I want to manually design and build bundles; carefully trying to avoid duplicating data, with any mistake meaning things get duplicated in memory. Can you name a use case where having a user download an asset more than once and duplicating it in memory is desirable? On any reasonably sized project, it's a nightmare to use this system without writing tons of code to automate the process.

Simply slapping new interfaces on it every other month is doing nothing but eroding my belief that the problems of shipping a game with asset bundles are understood by Unity. You guys are polishing a flawed design.

 

Hi @Reichert , is there any update on the progress you're making with asset bundles (the API, tooling, etc as you mentioned) ?

Also, i submitted a PR against the "browser" repo. in case you guys want to check it out.

 

I like it, except if you have a lot of asset bundles, there doesn't appear to be a way to right click to create one (as the list gets long and there is no empty bundle space) so it just selects whatever bundle you right clicked on.

Is the intent to organize the bundles into folders? Does putting these in folders change the structure of the asset bundle any or it it just a way to organize them?

Thanks! It's a huge improvement over the old way of doing things as we have new bundles each month for different levels and the old way was a huge pain.

 

Thanks for your input Brathnann. I'll get working on a way to add bundles even if the list is too long to have open space. That should definitely be in there. As to the folder question... the file structure on disk will mimic that in the browser. So if you created a bundle "FolderA/BundleB", you'd see a folder called "FolderA" on disk, and that folder would contain a bundle called "BundleB". I think in many cases, if you have large number of bundles in your game, it makes sense to use folders, but obviously there are situations where it does not. Independent of specific situations, the tool should work with whatever structure you choose to have.
I've created an issue for you on the github projct here: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AssetBundles-Browser/issues/14
Please subscribe to the issue so that once it's fixed I can let you know, and get feedback on the validity of the fix.
Thanks,
Bill

 

Thanks for the PR @liortal, I'll take a look at it.

 

Hi Bill, I recently posted Dependencies seem to be "Editor-based" and therefore misleading as issue on GitHub and this is related: Originally, I assumed that Unity's build-system / dependency checks would work in a way so that any assets that are included in the "main build" (i.e. all assets used by scenes included in the build settings and not included in assetbundles) are available to scenes / assets stored in AssetBundles. If that was the case, one could very easily add a few scenes to AssetBundles and rely on Unity to put the Assets exclusively used by those scenes into the relevant bundles (potentially duplicating assets that are used by multiple scenes in asset bundles that are not part of the "main build").

Using the AssetBundleBrowser, however, it seems that this is not the case, and instead, you have to use an "all or nothing" approach when using AssetBundles: Any assets used by any scenes in the main build, that are also used by scenes or assets in AssetBundles will always be both in the main build and also added to the AssetBundles.

So that means when you use AssetBundles, in most scenarios you'll be best off to just have one tiny "loader"-scene that uses almost no Assets and kind of bootstraps the game by loading the first AssetBundle(s) which has the first actual scene because that way, it's all in AssetBundles.

Is that really the case? Or am I just confused due to limitations of the tools I am using (currently, I'm trying to figure things out using AssetBundle-Browser and AssetBundleEditor, but even though AssetBundleEditor gives me much better info on why an Asset is included in any given bundle, it still seems to rely on the dependencies from the editor-perspective, which may be misleading.

It seems that once the AssetBundles are built, one could get the actually relevant information: Which Assets Are Included In An Asset Bundle? ... it seems like this would probably provide for a much better workflow if that information is somehow added to what AssetBundle-Browser (or AssetBundleEditor) shows.

 

Hi @jashan, It looks like you have two separate concerns to address.
One is that you'd like to be able to view the contents of a bundle after it has been built. This is a feature that I am currently developing for the browser and hope to have out soon. Its definitely something that we know to be helpful and are making a priority to get out.
The other item is what exactly happens when you mix and match including things in asset bundles and the standard player build. The short answer is that the two systems are completely unaware of each other, and the bundle browser is only aware of bundles. The player build will generally include the scenes explicitly added, those scenes' dependencies, and things in the Resources directory. If you also include assets in asset bundles, you do have potential duplicates due to shared dependencies. One solution is what you suggest; to only have a lightweight bootstrap scene in your player build and include everything else in bundles. It is not the only solution, and what you choose to do depends on your situation. For some the right solution would be to include the first handful of levels or tutorials in the built player, and have later levels in bundles on a content server. For others, it could be best to only reference prefabs by name in script, including those prefabs in bundles, but all other data with the player build. The key is to understand which items are getting built with your player.
I hope this is helpful information, and you can find use in the browser. I will post to this forum once the browser supports a post-build-analysis of bundles.

 

That is great to hear!

Do you have the information that those two systems are completely unaware of each other anywhere in the documentation? I believe that I have read most of the documentation about AssetBundles (including the tutorials and guidelines and "background information") at least one time, some parts several times ... and it only slowly dawned on me that this might be the case after running into some odd behaviors. The AssetBundleBrowser you're working on definitely helped realize this - but it's something I'd expect to read in the documentation. Actually, it probably should be one of the first things to read.

This is really not obvious - especially because normal player builds are uncompressed, and AssetBundles are usually compressed. So when I started using AssetBundles, my build size did decrease, even though I had lots of asset duplication in the builds.

Let me know what the best way is to let the documentation team know about this (if it's even an issue - but for me, it certainly was ;-) ).

Ironically, there is a fairly large section about how to organize AssetBundles in the manual - but it does not address this fairly fundamental issue (or at least I didn't see it addressing that issue).


Something else: It seems that another real minefield when using AssetBundles is shaders/materials. I noticed this when the terrain in some of our environments did not get effected by fog (there is also a related setting in the Player / Graphics settings, if I'm lucky this will fix this issue for me). One solution seems to be putting materials and shaders into the same AssetBundles so that the shader variants / keywords are properly handled. If that is the case, one nice feature for the AssetBundle browser would be to check materials / shader dependencies (i.e. give me a warning if I have the material without its shaders in a bundle). There may be even more to it (e.g. shaders used for image effects, or special purpose shaders may require some "special handling").

 

@jashan, I'll get your feedback on the documentation passed around so that it can be made more clear. I'll also investigate if there's anything the browser could do to help with shaders, but I'm not sure there is. A shader generally will be pulled in as a dependency of a material _but_ may not have the correct varaints. I don't think there's a good way for the browser to know what is wrong (if anything) in this situation. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ShaderVariantCollection.html might be something to look into.
Thanks for all your feedback.

 

Ah, that does sound good - I'm already using ShaderVariantCollections extensively and actually started pulling in the Shaders using those collections. So if Unity AssetBundles behave well with ShaderVariantCollections, I'm covered ;-)

Thanks for passing the documentation feedback around.

 

6666

 

Will it be possible to include an asset in a bundle only on specific platforms?

We are using a custom asset bundle build tool which builds asset bundles out of folders. If you create a subfolder named "PS4" the assets in this folder will only be included in a PS4 build. Shared for all platforms, Standalone or Windows for Windows builds and so on.

This is used for config files, prefabs, textures (we don't need Xbox button sprites on a PS4 build) and many more assets.

 

Unfortunately, no, the browser will not be providing platform specific functionality. It simply provides a (hopefully) better interface for Unity's built-in bundle assignment system. That system doesn't have any per-platform configuration at this time, so we can't really add it on top. You may be able to achieve what you're after using the graph tool (https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/assetbundlegraphtool). If you have the latest version of both the browser and the graph tool, you can use the browser to preview what the graph tool is going to build.

Of note as well is that the build-pipeline team is actively working on a redesigned build workflow that should cleanly support this kind of thing in the future. At that point, you would not use this bundle browser (or at least not in its current form) but should be able to define build configurations specific to each platform.

Thanks for your feedback, sorry it doesn't quite meet your workflow needs.

 

Thank you for your fast reply.

Maybe you can implement a similiar feature in the future. As long as the current API is supported we will use our tool anyway. Our artists and designer are used to work with it.

 

Must scene asset bundles now be built from the same project that requests them, or can I (continue to) build them in one project and load them in another?

 

Can anyone confirm that they're able to load asset bundle scenes built from external projects? Is this a new policy, or an oversight, or a bug, or just me being dense? I hate to be a pest, but I'd really appreciate some official comment on this issue, I have a lot riding on it.

 

Why not try it out? (while you're waiting for an official response) I honestly don't have an answer for you, because I haven't done a scene bundle. I do asset bundles that can be built in older versions of the project (still same unity version, just older copies that don't have all my updates). But those are simply bundles with images in them, so nothing compared to what you're asking.

Hopefully someone from Unity or that has tried this will be able to get back with you!

 

Yes, it works for me on previous versions of Unity, but not on 2017x.

 

I found a solution to loading externally build scenes, see https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/asset-bundle-scenes-workflow.483974/

 

Hi, I'm loving asset bundle browser - helped us to eliminate lots of asset duplication. However, could you also check to see if asset bundle assets are referenced within a scene, as there is still duplication of assets (in our case, mixers), which took longer to track down without this brilliant tool Would it be able to be added that ABB will check if asset bundles are referenced in scenes in the build list?

 

Hi, I find that the asset bundle browser pulled wrong assets in AssetList sometimes.
For example, I set a SpriteAtlas to a bundle "spritesatlas/shop", then it show warning that there are duplicated dependency, but I am sure that that SpriteAtlas don't contain those sprites. And the log report also don't contains those sprites. Those duplicated Sprites are in another bundle.



Bundle Name: shop
Compressed Size:116.6 kb
Uncompressed usage by category:
Textures 1.3 mb 98.6%
Meshes 0.0 kb 0.0%
Animations 0.0 kb 0.0%
Sounds 0.0 kb 0.0%
Shaders 0.0 kb 0.0%
Other Assets 10.1 kb 0.8%
Levels 0.0 kb 0.0%
Scripts 0.0 kb 0.0%
Included DLLs 0.0 kb 0.0%
File headers 7.6 kb 0.6%
Complete size 1.3 mb 100.0%

Used Assets and files from the Resources folder, sorted by uncompressed size:
1.0 mb 78.9% Built-in Texture2D: sactx-1024x1024-fmt36-2b899810486a6337147d95e51b768f32
256.1 kb 19.7% Built-in Texture2D: sactx-256x1024-fmt36-2b899810486a6337147d95e51b768f32
1.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopItem_gems.png
1.5 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopItem_coins.png
1.5 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/SpriteAtlas/Shop.spriteatlas
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_gift.png
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_c.png
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_b.png
0.7 kb 0.1% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shopframe_a.png
0.5 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_gemsCoins.png
0.5 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_popup_banner.png
0.5 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_new.png
0.4 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_gems_bg.png
0.4 kb 0.0% Assets/PH/Sprites/UI/Shop/icon_shop_coins_bg.png
0.3 kb 0.0% AssetBundle Object

 

Hi,

Why are bundles significantly larger than the actual size of the assets?
I've got assets totalling 7.7MB, and the bundle is 39MB. If I change the compression method, I get 59MB.
Using Unity 2017.3 - this wasn't happening in 5.6.x

Thanks

 

Hi Rockyip - I haven't done a ton of testing around sprite atlases, so I will dig into this more. I've created a ticket on the github page to better track it: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AssetBundles-Browser/issues/73

-Bill

 

I'm guessing you're talking about post-build size because I don't think the pre-build estimates in the browser change based on bundle compression.
As to the size changing as you "change the compression method". This would be expected. Uncompressed is obviously the largest. LZMA is the smallest, but requires the entire file to be loaded. LZ4 is in the middle, allowing for partial file loads.
As to the jump from 7.7 up to a larger built size, this isn't overly surprising either as source assets are converted into whatever format Unity needs during the build. For example, a Photoshop (PSD) file and a PNG based on that PSD often have drastically different sizes on-disk, but end up the same once built by Unity. The PSD will probably be larger than what Unity ends up with, and the PNG much smaller. PNG files are incredibly well compressed on-disk, but cannot be rendered directly from that compressed format. When a PNG is rendered (by any engine) it's in-memory size is a function of it's dimensions, and is completely disconnected from its size on-disk. Unity converts the PNG into a format more directly consumable during the build. PNGs are the most common file to cause this kind of discrepancy, but there are several others that could be leading to your specific situation.

I hope that helps,
Bill

 

It's fine, I gave up assetbundles

 

hi there, im using the prefab method of a scene into asset bundle then this is take from server then cached etc, its all working but, my boss runs 10 fps on the maps scenes on the .exe version on editor it runs fine on both , here my exe run fine and all fine but i get the assets bundles from my local disk coz its more easy for test... what can be the cause of the issue some one?

 

well, I'm not 100% sure what you're asking here, but it sounds like you're wondering why you're getting a framerate issue in your game. Unfortunately that really has nothing to do with the bundle browser. This tool just helps you manage your bundle layouts and reduce duplicated assets. Most likely the best approach is for you to start a new thread on the forum, and give a good bit more details. From the details you've given, I can't readily see what the problem might be.

-Bill

 

Hi, great job! I'm using the AssetBundle Browser and I think this tool greatly simplifies my workflow using asset bundles.

One small feature I want to have is to build some bundle specifically. Like now I have tons of small bundles in the browser and when I change maybe one bundle and I want to build it but I can't, I can just build all of the bundles together which is time-consuming.

 

That won't be possible with the current asset bundle API without causing a manifest which only includes that specific bundle in the list.

 

Ah, I see, thanks for the quick reply.

 

If you change an asset bundle and rebuild them, only that one should build as long as it finds the other bundles in the folder already that you are saving them to.

 

How can i make a bundle of a scene with all their dependencies, when i try it tells me it doesnt allow scenes with other assets, i want to use something like the obsolete method
BuildPipeline.BuildStreamedSceneAssetBundle(levels, outputpath, BuildTarget.WebGL, BuildOptions.UncompressedAssetBundle);
It says its obsolete but i dont see any other alternative

 

I have the same problem as dienat but my issue is with scripts not getting packaged with the scenes.

I tried creating an asset bundle with one scene with a script that has just one debug statement , packaging it into an asset bundle ( using the asset bundle browser) to load it in another project. The script doesn't load at all.I was thinking of updating scenes on the fly using asset bundles , but it looks like its not feasible now . I am using 2018.2.5f1. Has anyone found a way to get this working?

 

Anything Unity recognizes as a dependency is pulled in automatically. If you mean "dependency" to cover things that are not direct references (such as some prefab you instantiate from code), then yes you need it in a bundle, but it has to be a different bundle than the one with the scene.

I believe your issue is completely different. Loading asset bundles, and then loading things from those bundles (that order is required) is a somewhat convoluted process with a lot of pitfalls. Are you familiar with loading from bundles? The bundle browser is just there to help you manage what is built into your bundles. Loading at runtime is beyond the scope of this tool. If you can upgrade your project to 2018.2 or newer, I'd recommend using Addressables as that covers the build and runtime needs https://forum.unity.com/forums/addressables.156/

-Bill

 

Hi Bill ,

Thanks for the reply. I am familiar with the asset bundle browser. Used it to package and deploy assets ( excluding scripts ). I did look at Addressables but I wasn't able to find anything that covers scripts and scripts packaging there. Am I missing something ?

 

Scripts are always built with the player. Scripts cannot be built into asset bundles, and there is no straightforward way to distribute code separately from your player. so you are not missing anything, it's just the way things are.

-Bill

 

Bill - it's a very interesting topic as to why this is not possible.

I guess this was a very conscious design choice, but I am wondering what was the reason ? (Security ? Mobile app store regulations? etc)

 

I can't speak for most platforms, but for iOS, they require the script to be built with the app. Or, at least that was the way it was before. (Apple has a lot of strict regulations)

Now, there are suppose to be ways around this if you use something like lua\ruby, which I think would be if you were allowing user created content, but I'm not familiar with how that works, I've just seen it mentioned.

 

yes, i could guess that may be one of the reasons, *BUT* Unity is a cross-platform engine with over 20 different platforms you can export to. Having this restriction based on iOS alone seems strange to me.

 

I've found that asset bundles can contain scripts, as long as the player into which they're imported already contains the script and any dependencies. I use this for stuff like setting properties of hotspots. So while you can't distribute "new" code in an asset bundle, you can attach scripts that are / will be in the player.

 

Asset bundles never hold any scripts (old or new).

They can only hold serialized references to scripts that *already exist* in your built player.

 

that's what I meant to say

 

Honestly I don't know the initial reasoning as this was architected long before I joined Unity. At this point, there are a few teams looking into ways to improve the code distribution system, but anything we might do would be a very large undertaking. So things may change in the future, but it would take a lot of work, and would have to find solutions to a lot of issues (including the quite valid ones you mentioned)