Addressables are effectively a wrapper around the Asset Bundle system that make working with Asset Bundles much easier than they were prior. Although it is intended to reduce the complexities of working with Asset Bundles, fair warning! It is still fairly complicated to work with Addressables, and as such, we recommend thoroughly researching the topic and trying to gain a decent understanding of it before trying to build a complete game using Addressables in the SAM system.
If you feel you are up to the task, great! Addressables are truly the way to go if you can, as it grants you flexibility in how you deploy your streaming assets (locally on the users computer or remotely on a server).
If you aren't sure, don't worry! It is relatively simple to upgrade from using Prefabs or Scenes to using Addressables, so for now, start with using one (or both) of those systems first.
As stated, Addressables are complicated. We do not provide general assistance in understanding the Addressables System, as Unity has already provided documentation for this purpose, in addition to the many tutorial videos you can find online on the subject. However we do provide some general wisdom that has been gleaned with our own work with Addressables.
When we discuss Addressables in relation to the Streamable Assets Manager, therefore, we will assume you have a decent understanding of the underly Addressables system. The remainder of this Section will give you an overview of how the Streamable Assets Manager can aid you in working with Addressables.
The World Designer tool is a tool that can aid you in fleshing out your game world. One advanced feature of it is the ability to hook up Asset Creators, which can automatically generate new assets so that you can add new things to your world. Fortunately, the default Asset Creator included with the Streamable Assets Manager is configured to work with Addressables!
There are also default systems in place for managing Addressable Assets in other ways, such as destroying them and saving changes to them.
SAM includes default Chunk Streamers that allow you to stream in Addressable Prefabs and Scenes. These streamers should serve you in 99% of cases, however if they don't, you can use the source code as a jumping off point for designing your own custom Chunk Streamers. You can learn more about these Chunk Streamers using the following two links.
Barring any particular restrictions that require you to use Addressable Prefabs, we highly recommend using Addressable Scenes instead, as they are more efficient to load. This means you can generally get away with using larger Asset Chunks (i.e., more children per chunk), which means you'll use less Asset Chunks overall, which will speed up the loading process.