As you must download all your asset data before your content starts, consider moving assets out of your main data files and into AssetBundles
. Moving the assets to AssetBundles
lets you create a small loader scene for your content, which dynamically loads assets on-demand as the user proceeds through your content. AssetBundles
also help with Asset data memory management. You can unload asset data from memory for assets that you don’t need any more by calling AssetBundle.Unload.
The following considerations apply when using AssetBundles
on the WebGL platform:
When you use class types in your AssetBundle which aren’t used in your main build, Unity might strip the code for those classes from the build. This can cause a fail when trying to load Assets from the AssetBundle. Use BuildPlayerOptions.assetBundleManifestPath to fix that, or refer to Distribution size and code stripping for other options.
WebGL doesn’t support threading. As HTTP downloads become available only after they’re downloaded, Unity WebGL builds need to decompress AssetBundle data on the main thread after the download is complete, blocking the main thread. To avoid this interruption, LZMA AssetBundle compression isn’t available for AssetBundles on WebGL and instead compresses using LZ4, which is de-compressed efficiently on-demand. If you need smaller compression sizes than what LZ4 delivers, you can configure your web server to use gzip or Brotli compression (on top of LZ4 compression) on your AssetBundles. For more information on how to do this, refer to Deploying compressed builds.
WebGL supports AssetBundle
caching with UnityWebRequestAssetBundle.GetAssetBundle. This method uses the IndexedDB
API from your browser to store a cache on the user’s device. Some browsers might have limited support for IndexedDB
and any browsers might request the user’s authorization to store data on the disk. For more information, refer to WebGL browser compatibility.