Loading scene assets

[alter-kaker]

At the current state of Bevy, what is the recommended approach to load the assets that are required by a particular scene? I don't want to load all the sprites used in a game, for example. I'd rather load a scene and then only load those that are required by it. I saw some discussions that seem to touch on this subject, but I haven't been able to find an example of how it's currently done. I also don't want to hardcode a type for each kind of "thing" in my game either, I want to say "here's an entity, here are its components, and it should have a Sprite component with this path." There's also this example in bevy_asset_loader, but I'm not sure how this would integrate with scenes, which seem like the right mechanism to encode game state.

Thanks in advance!

[MukundaKatta]

The current best pattern is bevy_asset_loader states feeding into your own "scene manifest" — a RON/TOML file listing per-scene assets that you load on state entry and drop on exit. Scenes themselves don't drive loading yet; you gate with AssetCollections keyed to your state enum. Skip hardcoding types by using DynamicAssetCollection — the manifest entries carry the component+path pairs you described.

[alter-kaker]

Let me see if I understand:

I have one manifest file that contains listings of per-scene assets for all scenes. That gets loaded once and is used to know which assets should be loaded.
Then I would have anothet loading state where I'd read the manifest, look up the current loaded scene?

My understanding of DynamicAssetCollection is that the keys in it are hardcoded via an attribute macro, otherwise you have to use the internal API like here?

[MukundaKatta]

You're right, and apologies — the macro-hardcoded-keys thing is a real limitation of DynamicAssetCollection as written, so my answer oversold it. The manual path (bypassing the macro and using the raw DynamicAssets API to load/drop per scene) is the only way to really drive it from a manifest today. I haven't shipped this exact pattern, so treat the suggestion as "direction worth trying" rather than "known-good recipe." Bevy's asset loader story is still evolving here.

[alter-kaker]

This makes me think that there's going to be a lot of changes in the near-ish future, and maybe it would be better to wait for a more mature API, and work on something else first. I'm more in the trying things out+architecting stage, so i could start implementing pretty much anywhere—and asset loading from a manifest is really important for this project.