I have created some asset bundles from my Unity assets using the directions given in the Unity documentation section on AssetBundle Workflow. After running the "Build AssetBundles" command, each asset bundle results in four files: myasset, myasset.meta, myasset.manifest, myasset.manifest.meta.
Now I am ready to deploy these bundles to a web server and implement downloading/caching in my Unity project. I have found numerous examples such as this that show the download URL to be a single file with a .unity3d extension. This is leading me to conclude that I am missing a step - I assume that all four of my files will be required by the app and that I have to do something to combine them into a .unity3d file first.
What file(s) do I need to deploy? Are there any additional steps that I need to take before my file(s) are ready to upload? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Just myasset will suffice.
Sometimes people optionally add .unity3d as a filename extension to their Asset Bundles. It is just a community convention, and is completely optional. Source (copied below)
Vincent-Zhang
Unity Technologies
Just a reminder, we don't have an official file extension ".unity3d" for asset bundle, it's not mandatory. You can use whatever file extension as you want, or without file extension.
But usually people use ".unity3d" as the file extension just because we used it in the official sample code at first time...
Unity creates the .meta files for all assets- you don't have to worry about those. In short, your myasset file is enough. I do not add file extensions to mine. Do note that if you use the strategy shown in the example that you shared that the client will re-download the bundle from the server every time. You need to additionally provide a version number if you want to take advantage of caching. You can see this in some of the method overloads here, the ones that have a Hash128 or uint "version" parameter. Caching is great because you can use the bundle that is already saved on the device next time instead of downloading from the server when no changes have occurred. The version/hash number you provide essentially gets mapped to the file name. Whenever a matching version is found, the file on disk is used. Update the version number to something else when the content changes to force the client to download anew.
You may want to reference the .manifest file for the CRC value listed there. You may have noticed a crc parameter in the link I shared as well. This can be used to ensure data integrity during transmission of the bundle data. You can make sure the downloaded content's CRC matches that of the bundle when you created it.
Related
I am limited to the size of web applications I can build by the "Build\application.data" file.
I.e if its over a certain size I cannot upload it certain hosts, github, etc.
Ideally I would like to split the application into multiple data files under a certain size, while the application is still executable.
How would this be possible? Is this something I can do from Unity build configuration?
Can I do it after the build is done?
Can I split the file into chunks by archiving it with zero compression, and somehow still execute it from the browser? There is a file called Build.Loader.js, is it something that can be edited for this purpose?
This is for the purposes of using the application after it has been uploaded, not sharing it, I do not want to compress it into separate archives, or use gitlfs, I've tested this and the application does not work from the browser with github and gitlfs.
Thanks
Unity has 2 technologies for split data file:
Asset bundle
An AssetBundle is an archive file that contains platform-specific
non-code Assets (such as Models, Textures, Prefabs, Audio clips, and
even entire Scenes) that Unity can load at run time
Addressbles
The Addressable Asset System allows the developer to ask for an asset
via its address. Once an asset (e.g. a prefab) is marked
"addressable", it generates an address which can be called from
anywhere. Wherever the asset resides (local or remote), the system
will locate it and its dependencies, then return it.
Both technologies create separate files that you can host on a server and download as needed. Addressable is a newer technology that Unity team recommends.
Probably the total size of the bundle will grow, but user will be able to download only the necessary assets and the amount of data for the user may decrease
If you do not use Unity solutions, you can divide data file into parts. But on the client side (javascript) you will need to download all the parts, connect them and pass to Unity loader. You probably won't be able to use the browser's built-in gzip or brotli (not sure). It seems to be quite difficult.
I would like a better workflow for debugging uploaded SCOs. As things are, I must edit a file in the activity, repackage, upload, and test. Often, I just need to change a single line of code. It would be VERY nice to be able to edit that file, that line of code, on the server. So far, all I've found is that Moodle manages the files, so it seems impractical to locate and decipher the renamed files after upload.
Is there a way to configure Moodle so that it doesn't rename and relocated files in SCOs upon extraction? Actually, I'm open to any suggestions on the best, fastest workflow for debugging SCOs.
Problem background
Since Moodle 2.0, files are no longer stored on server in the conventional /this/is/the/path/to/my.file way. Instead, files are rehashed and stored in Repositories (i.e. spread all over the moodledata folder as a collection of seemingly random data). This increases security and cross-OS compatibility but complicates stuff for people who would like to simply upload a SCORM zip package via FTP. Here's more information on file handling in Moodle 2.0
Path to the soluton
Let's locate the file you want to update, then update it.
Run phpmyadmin, go to mdl_files table, find your file by name in the filename field (let's say it's portrait.jpg)
Look at the contenthash field, it'll look like abcde1234567890. This means your file is stored in moodledata/filedir/ab/cd/ folder under the name abcde1234567890.
Rename the updated portrait.jpg to abcde1234567890, upload and overwrite.
Go back to phpmyadmin and update the filesize field in record for portrait.jpg with the size of the updated file.
Obviously, this process can be automated. You'll have to write a script that allows you to upload a file, then it'll search for that file in mdl_files, save it to the correct folder and update all fields accordingly.
Alternative idea
Enable external package type (and also enable 'Update on every launch'). Go to Site administration / Plugins / Activities / SCORM and check the box down below. Now you'll be able to launch SCORM packages directly from another server, so Moodle won't mess with it. Of course, you can run in other (probably cross-domain related) problems.
Sergey's answer is very good, with one caveat:
In his example with the contenthash of abcde1234567890, the file is stored in the moodledata/filedir/ab/cd/ folder under the name abcde1234567890. Moodle uses the full contenthash to name the file.
I am working on an email client based on ReMail. Basically, I reused the ReMail project so that the MailCore etc dependencies would be all set up out of the box so I could build a new app on top of them. I'm trying to give the app to some beta testers via ad hoc, but when I try to create an IPA, I receive this error:
xxxx does not contain a single–bundle application or contains multiple products. Please select another archive, or adjust your scheme to create a single–bundle application.
I have set Skip Install to YES for all dependencies, and moved all files under Copy Header to the "project" section, but I am still unable to build a single APP file.
I don't know if this is significant, but when I open up the xcarchive file, within the products directory, I find a the APP file under Applications, and then a file structure mirroring the absolute path to the header files for MailCore.
Any ideas as to what might be going on? I'm very near the tearing-out-chunks-of-hair-in-frustration stage, and I don't think the unnaturally bald crazy person look would suit me.
Thanks!
Try removing the “Copy Headers” phase entirely. It's only supposed to be used for frameworks, not static libraries. The Xcode static library template that includes a “Copy Headers” phase is wrong.
Check out the “Working with Schemes and Projects in Xcode” video from WWDC 2012, starting at 45m10s.
How do you distribute other files needed by your application that aren't in a jar file? For example, the application at http://www.javabeginner.com/java-swing/java-swing-shuffle-game . The download contains Shuffle.jar, Shuffle.bat, Score.dat, and an images folder with 3 images in it. I can see possibly putting the images directly in Shuffle.jar, but you wouldn't want to put Score.dat in the jar file because it changes. Is there somewhere you could identify this type of file in the jnlp?
The non-java files should be stored as resources. For files that change, you store the original or template file also as a resource in your jar. When the program starts, you have it check the local system to see if that file exists. If not, it creates the local file by copying the template file from the JAR resource. If the file already exists, then it is used as is.
To save files to the local system, even when running in the sandbox (unsigned), you can use the PersistenceService (javadoc / example). If your java application is signed, then you can use the regular File apis to write the file to the local machine, such as in a ".yourgame" subfolder under the user's home folder.
You can put all those files (except the scores file) in your jar file and load the contents using resource loading.
I've just deleted and restarted my reply twice now, changing my answer each time; this is confusing and needs a bit more clarification.
Are you SURE that application is supposed to be a Web Start app? On the site you linked to, it doesn't appear to be. Are you trying to take an application that was not designed as a Web Start application and change it into one that can be Web Start?
If it's not a Web Start app as your tag implies, then this question is open ended. You can distribute it 100 different ways.
If you are indeed trying to convert it into a Web Start app, you can start by packaging the images into the jar and that will alleviate your first headache if you just read them from there instead of from a File(). If it's going to be Web Start, then you need to decide how you want to keep scores. You have to decide what the scoring system is like before you can decide on how to go about it; will all the scores be kept on the web site hosting the Web Start app? Will that part still be local? If you want to get access to the local file system, you need to sign the jar, then you can extract the score.dat to the file system and do whatever you want with it if the end user accepts.
You need to figure out what you want to do before you can do it, or at least clear it up for us if you already know more than we know you know.
Right, this is the problem I have a container (rar,zip) which contains images png's tiffs bmps or jpegs in an order.
The file extension isnt zip or rar though but uses the same compression.
I want to pull out a list of images contained within the file in the numerical order, then depending on the user decision go to the image selected.
I'm not after any code just the high level thought process/logic of how this can be achieved and how it could be achieved on iphone OS.
From what i know of iphone OS it uses a kind of sandbox environment so how would this effect the process as well.
Thanks
You can include the libz framework in your project and write some C to manage zipped data. Or you can use Objective-C wrapper classes others have written.
Your application resides in its own sandbox. You can include zip files in the "bundle", i.e. add them to your project, and copy them to the application's Documents folder to work with them. Or you can copy archived data over the network to the application's Documents folder if you don't want to include files in your project.
I don't think the extension matters so much as the data being in the format you expect it to be.
Everything I wrote above is for zip-ped files. If you're working with rar-formatted archives, you'll need to look at making a static library for the iPhone, perhaps from the UnRAR source code.