I am a little confused by this post. You want to “reduce” the amount of downloading required so you start by downloading every asset we have? 1000s of files? Rather than just making the assets available on demand when you need them?
This recently came up in another post. The only reason we offer downloading assets locally is for air gapped systems. Meaning computers that are actually designed to be off-line for long periods of time. I would certainly not recommend this approach unless you have that specific need.
Isaac Sim works best with a strong Internet connection to check for important assets, extensions, and updates. I would not try to circumnavigate this. You don’t need to download anything else once Isaac Sim starts, unless you select it. Everything from that point on is on demand only. The asset browsers in Isaac are designed to be hardcoded to S3. Although we offer you the ability to download the assets, that is not the same thing as redirecting the browsers to local assets. So you are correct in identifying that, even though you’ve downloaded these assets locally, it makes no difference to the browsers.
My personal advice is, I would not do this and stick to keeping Isaac as a simple program that downloads when required.
Is the ultimate goal to save yourself time from downloading assets from the browser? Are you downloading a lot of assets? I download one or two yes, but to save myself significant time, with local assets, I would have to download hundreds of them, to see a significant difference. With a good Internet connection they should download so fast you can’t really detect them. Certainly not more than a difference of a second or two from local install.
Also, 90% of the time to load an asset is creating the local texture shaders, which happened whether you have it locally or not. Only10% of the time is actually spent downloading the files. You can verify this by downloading anything once, and then try to download a second time. On a second time, it basically loads instantly. This is because of the texture cache. Try by downloading the largest asset we have, the Isaac Sim warehouse. It’s a big file with lots of textures. It will take about five minutes to load the first time, but the second time it’ll take about 15 seconds to open. This is because everything you downloaded is now cached in the local folders. This makes downloading local assets even less necessary. You just have to download something once.
The other issue is that those browsers are “live”, meaning that if we need to change something, we can change it instantly. You can’t get that with local assets. For example, if we find a problem with one of the robots, that will be fixed immediately and re-uploaded. If you spent hours downloading all the robots, then you will not get that fix. So going local means that we are unable to offer you updates. Also, from time to time we add new robots, new environments, new textures, new materials. All of that goes away with local downloads.
