Loading resources from AssetBundles

Loading and unloading objects from an AssetBundle

Having created an AssetBundle object from the downloaded data, you can load the objects contained in it using three different methods:

To unload assets you need to use AssetBundle.Unload. This method takes a boolean parameter which tells Unity whether to unload all data (including the loaded asset objects) or only the compressed data from the downloaded bundle. If your application is using some objects from the AssetBundle and you want to free some memory you can pass false to unload the compressed data from memory. If you want to completely unload everything from the AssetBundle you should pass true which will destroy the Assets loaded from the AssetBundle.

Loading objects from an AssetBundles asynchronously

You can use the AssetBundle.LoadAsync method to load objects Asynchronously and reduce the likelihood of having hiccups in your application.

using UnityEngine;

// Note: This example does not check for errors. Please look at the example in the DownloadingAssetBundles section for more information
IEnumerator Start () {
	// Start a download of the given URL
	WWW www = WWW.LoadFromCacheOrDownload (url, 1);

	// Wait for download to complete
	yield return www;

	// Load and retrieve the AssetBundle
	AssetBundle bundle = www.assetBundle;

	// Load the object asynchronously
	AssetBundleRequest request = bundle.LoadAsync ("myObject", typeof(GameObject));

	// Wait for completion
	yield return request;

	// Get the reference to the loaded object
	GameObject obj = request.asset as GameObject;

        // Unload the AssetBundles compressed contents to conserve memory
        bundle.Unload(false);

        // Frees the memory from the web stream
        www.Dispose();
}

back to AssetBundles Intro

Page last updated: 2013-07-05