Question How to organize environments

[HaiiiHarrr]

Hey everyone, is there a kinda easy way to file manage?

I kinda binge-downloaded a bunch of assets and now it is a mess to find environments I want to tinker with.

I kinda am tempted to open every single .var in AddonPackages with 7zip and extract any environment I can find in the custom - asset folder just so that those are isolated and all bunched up in one folder...

 

[atani]

I've gone that road but then if you intend to share any scene in the Hub or elsewhere it's a pain to find out who made what or even worse that you can't share it at all.

My current system is to have a folder called Environments in AddonPackages. All my environment VARs are there with 2 subfolders: Hub and Restricted:

• Restricted is for CUAs that are not in the Hub and they exist as assetbundle files with a thumbnail image. They're strictly for personal use as I cannot share them.
• Hub or shareable environments usually come in a VAR, so I leave them all in the Environments folder. The Hub subfolder is where I have a thumbnail of the environments in those VARs with a useful name for me (room, house, beach, etc) and the creator's name so that I can quickly find what VAR it is. The thumbnails allow me to quickly see what I have without having to open each one at a time in VAM, then in VaM I can easily select my choice of environment VAR.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I've gone that road but then if you intend to share any scene in the Hub or elsewhere it's a pain to find out who made what or even worse that you can't share it at all.

My current system is to have a folder called Environments in AddonPackages. All my environment VARs are there with 2 subfolders: Hub and Restricted:

• Restricted is for CUAs that are not in the Hub and they exist as assetbundle files with a thumbnail image. They're strictly for personal use as I cannot share them.
• Hub or shareable environments usually come in a VAR, so I leave them all in the Environments folder. The Hub subfolder is where I have a thumbnail of the environments in those VARs with a useful name for me (room, house, beach, etc) and the creator's name so that I can quickly find what VAR it is. The thumbnails allow me to quickly see what I have without having to open each one at a time in VAM, then in VaM I can easily select my choice of environment VAR.

Does this technique using subfolders affect existing scenes built on those assets, or does Vam find them anyway, as long as they are somewhere in AddonPackages?

 

[atani]

VaM doesn't care about the subfolders, it just sees the VAR and takes it as a virtual folder. It's fine to move around your VARs in AddonPackages without any worry something will break because it's now in a subfolder.
I've been using subfolders for years now to manage my VARs, and as long as you keep it tidy without duplicates it's all fine.

This also helps in VaM when filtering by location (sidebar lists) if I don't recall the name of what I want to open, as I have subfolders for plugins, looks, etc.

 

[HaiiiHarrr]

I've gone that road but then if you intend to share any scene in the Hub or elsewhere it's a pain to find out who made what or even worse that you can't share it at all.

My current system is to have a folder called Environments in AddonPackages. All my environment VARs are there with 2 subfolders: Hub and Restricted:

• Restricted is for CUAs that are not in the Hub and they exist as assetbundle files with a thumbnail image. They're strictly for personal use as I cannot share them.
• Hub or shareable environments usually come in a VAR, so I leave them all in the Environments folder. The Hub subfolder is where I have a thumbnail of the environments in those VARs with a useful name for me (room, house, beach, etc) and the creator's name so that I can quickly find what VAR it is. The thumbnails allow me to quickly see what I have without having to open each one at a time in VAM, then in VaM I can easily select my choice of environment VAR.

at the moment I am not planning to share any scenes anyways, so I guess I will give your solution a shot and if that is not helping, I will probably rezip half of my addonpackage folder.

 

[atani]

In that case the easiest management is to extract the assetbundle and make a thumbnail for it if none exists. On some environments it's better to keep the scene too if they have lots of assetbundle assets, lights, scripts, etc.

 

[HaiiiHarrr]

In that case the easiest management is to extract the assetbundle and make a thumbnail for it if none exists. On some environments it's better to keep the scene too if they have lots of assetbundle assets, lights, scripts, etc.

the folder approach is at the moment already a good start, thanks for that. I guess time will tell if I pick everything apart or not