Suggestion - inverted dependency search.

[C132]

Hi, this is more of a suggestion/feature request than an issue - not sure how to flag it as such (sorry!).

I'm in the process of implementing addressables into our project and the need for finding how and when an asset is being loaded into memory has been a critical part of the pipeline. I've had to write my own tool to find assets that are depending on a specific asset - it works but isn't very pretty and isn't really well written.

This tool, however, is both well written and pretty A+! But, the dependency lookup chain seems to only be one way. I can select an asset and find what asset it depends on - but what I desperately need is to be able to select an asset and see what depends on it!

I think this will be a common need for people as they start integrating addressables and other memory management tools into their projects.

The work you have done here is fantastic and deeply appreciated.

Thank you, regardless if this request is ever materialized.

[Unity-Harry]

Hey!
Thanks for the suggestion, this is achievable but it requires a process of loading each asset into memory to gather their dependencies to build up a lookup table.
https://github.com/Facepunch/WhatUsesThis is an example of how you can go about that.

The main problem with this approach is that it doesn't scale well for large projects (imagine loading 100k assets into memory 😄), the other issue is that the lookup table can become out of sync.

I'd like to investigate adding this as an experimental feature that's enabled via a checkbox but I'm unsure when I'll be able to get some more dev time on this, hopefully soon! :)