Some scripts are targeted for the Editor experience, while others are examples of how you use asset bundles at runtime in your game/app.

This tool is something you install/import in your game as raw. This is where Unity contains coordination logic regarding asset bundles, but the actual bundle packing mechanism is buried in the native part of Unity. The UnityEditor.BuildPipeline class within the UnityEditor.dll assembly.It puts the asset build pipeline in total control of the developer. It feels *very* unnatural and more like a hack, however it is understandable why it is implemented that way. That’s right – you have to “import” it into your game/app. An Asset Bundle Manager and a (quite crappy) DEV/TEST server, which are delivered through the Unity Asset Store.The entire Asset Bundles functionality is encapsulated in the following places: Your typical next step is to upload the bundle to a web server (which you also manage on your own) and get your game/app to download it and store it on disk. You execute the bundle separately and deal with the output on your own. Asset Bundles are not part of the build output.In big projects we really have to manage this process carefully. Just in case it is not obvious, the HTTP client needs to download a the bundle (and dump it from memory to disk), release memory, then go about decompressing, which again consumes memory. Asset Bundles use LZMA or LZ4 compression (depending on the Editor version), which can significantly reduce your build size.An Asset Bundle can contain an entire scene, but if it does – it can’t contain anything else (in practical terms).Asset Bundles store serialized versions of Unity game objects, such as scenes and everything that a scene could contain.You can think of them as packages with lots of assets inside. They are containers for objects and assets.Separate the asset bundles from the standard build – the key reason for this could be to reduce build times.The Asset Bundles API lets you manage what is stored in memory for a potential manual memory management use-case.You can delivery variants of content for different devices and runtimes – for example differentiate between high-resolution and low-resolution assets, or Android vs Windows assets, potentially allowing you to optimize for devices.Update game content by replacing the asset bundles located on a server – a very poor man’s game objects patching system.

Download in-game content during the first run of the game with the goal of minimizing the initial installation size.

You can do “in-game” downloading of external content. This post is a detailed write-up on what Asset Bundles are in Unity, what they should be used for and how they work internally.Īsset Bundles in Unity are an editor and platform feature that let you configure and deliver dynamic content to your games or apps.

Raw unity asset viewer