As of now, the override of the WearNTear Highlight function within Extension.cs does copy materials and directly modify the color field of the materials:
This leads to the creation of new material instances. Creating new instances is on one hand unnecessarily expensive in terms of computational time and in terms of memory (which can be neglected in that case) and on the other hand causes issues with material caching, as it is done in the following code snippet:
https://github.com/sirskunkalot/PlanBuild/blob/02d68bb4f164f83635f88e9792210ee4e9d83712/PlanBuild/Utils/ShaderHelper.cs#L129-L132
As new instances haven new names, this caching mechanism is not only inefficient but also prone to storing wrong original material information (such as saving materials that are colored).
Solution
Use MaterialPropertyBlocks (see unity documentation and explanatory article) to change the color of materials.
I suggest to use the ColorfulPieces mod, which provides a clean and efficient implementation, or alternatively implement it completely by yourself (example).
As of now, the override of the WearNTear
Highlightfunction within Extension.cs does copy materials and directly modify thecolorfield of the materials:https://github.com/sirskunkalot/PlanBuild/blob/02d68bb4f164f83635f88e9792210ee4e9d83712/PlanBuild/Extensions.cs#L35-L46
This leads to the creation of new material instances. Creating new instances is on one hand unnecessarily expensive in terms of computational time and in terms of memory (which can be neglected in that case) and on the other hand causes issues with material caching, as it is done in the following code snippet: https://github.com/sirskunkalot/PlanBuild/blob/02d68bb4f164f83635f88e9792210ee4e9d83712/PlanBuild/Utils/ShaderHelper.cs#L129-L132 As new instances haven new names, this caching mechanism is not only inefficient but also prone to storing wrong original material information (such as saving materials that are colored).
Solution Use
MaterialPropertyBlocks(see unity documentation and explanatory article) to change the color of materials. I suggest to use the ColorfulPieces mod, which provides a clean and efficient implementation, or alternatively implement it completely by yourself (example).Notes