Asset Bundles vs Addressables

I finally ported the whole of Gesture Quest into a browser, and to make sure it actually worked, I recruited the most trustworthy QA I know: my big sister.

The tracking worked, but the problem was everything before it. Loading took forever, long enough that she assumed the thing was broken and just sitting there doing nothing. And every so often the tab would reload itself halfway through loading. It turns out this is the browser's way of saying it ran out of memory and gave up. On mobile especially, a tab that blows past its memory ceiling gets quietly killed and reloaded from scratch.

So I went digging and ran straight into Unity's asset story.

Asset Bundles are the old way, which we used in Gesture Quest. You pack your models, textures, and sounds into separate files and load them at runtime instead of stuffing everything into the build. You handle the loading, unloading, and dependencies yourself. Addressables are the newer layer on top: every asset gets an "address," and Unity handles the bundling and the fetching for you, local or remote.

Addressables are the shinier option, so why did I stick with Asset Bundles? Because I am lazy, and we were already using them to load assets dynamically in the standalone build. All I really had to do was point those same bundles at the server instead of a folder buried inside the game. Ship the heavy stuff on demand, not all at once.

The tracking runs great. The game is still a little laggy, but I am pretty sure once the memory situation is fully sorted, I will be in good shape.

Last but not least, thank you, sis, for the help.