These more granular AssetBundles alleviate the problem of large bundles retaining assets in memory that we no longer need. While we currently have a single Addressable Group that packs all of its assets into one AssetBundle, we can instead create an AssetBundle for each prefab. To fix this problem, we must change the way that we organize our AssetBundles. The texture BossSword_E remains in memory even after the boss sword has been released. This means that every prefab listed in our InventorySystem will reside in memory, along with all the dependencies of those prefabs (textures, meshes, audio, etc.)Īs we create a build and take a snapshot with the Memory Profiler, we can see that the textures for our assets are already stored in memory even though none of them are instantiated. When the scene is loaded, all objects in the scene are also loaded into memory along with their dependencies. We will simply apply hard references (direct assignment in the inspector, tracked by GUID ) to our prefabs in a MonoBehaviour that exists in our scene. Let's start with the most basic implementation and then work our way toward the best approach for setting up our Addressables content. Stage 1: Hard references, no Addressables If you're using Unity 2021.1, select the Add package by name option from the additional menu (+) in the Package Manager window. In Unity 2020 LTS, you must first enable preview packages in Project Settings before installing this package from the Package Manager. We're using the preview package Memory Profiler to view memory at runtime. You can download the project files for this example on my GitHub. These assets are not needed at all times during gameplay.We have an InventoryManager script in the scene with references to our three inventory assets: Sword, Boss Sword, Shield prefabs.Inventory exampleįor this series of recommendations, we will work with a simple example that's set up in the following way: This blog will cover a number of scenarios and issues you can run into when setting up your project to use Unity Addressable Asset System - and explain how to recognize them and promptly fix them. Weak references mean that you have control over when the referenced asset is loaded into and out of memory the Addressable System will find all of the necessary dependencies and load them, too.

Using Addressables can improve runtime memory by introducing weak references to prevent unnecessary assets from being loaded.

Memory is a scarce resource that you must manage carefully, especially when porting a project to a new platform. That's why I'd like to share some tips on how to leverage the Unity Addressable Asset System to enhance your content loading strategy. As a consultant on our Professional Services team, I've been striving to improve the performance of many customer projects. Efficient streaming of assets in and out of memory is a key element of any quality game.

Unity asset bundle viewer